The Lakotas and the Black Hills

Jeffrey Ostler. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

This short, readable popular history is a good introduction to the history of the dispossession of the Lakota peoples' claims to the Black Hills, and subsequent legal battles to have those claims recognized, compensated, and addressed. It also touches on issues of the legitimacy of Indian claims to first sovereignty in general, as the Lakota people were arguably relative to the Black Hills, who replaced earlier Indian people from whom they might have acquired some of their mythologies and spiritual beliefs connected to the landscape and specific places.

One of the arguments used to justify the dispossession of the Lakota was to rely ohn reports which downplayed their presence in, and longtime residency in, the Black Hills--Ostler makes a compelling argument that such claims, when not completely dishonest, relied on a misunderstanding of the ways in which the Lakota used the resources of the Black Hills and focused their cultural and spiritual practices on specific places in the landscape.

A better understanding of the Lakota people are their claims to the Black Hills should help readers develop a broader appreciation for how impossibly rigorous standards of legitimacy and historical veracity have been wielded by State governments and Federal authorities to undermine Indian sovereignty and access to judicial recourse. The second half of this book, which follows the long, still-unfinished legal battle for recognition of Lakota claims, is also a reminder that Indian history didn't end with the end of the Treaty period, or with the confinement to reservations at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Romance of Reunion

Nina Silber. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

The story of Reconstruction, the Redemption of white rule, and the eventual "reunion" of the Northern and Southern whites a few decades after the end of the Civil War--at the expense of African-Americans, who were pointedly "written out" of the national narrative--is frequently told from the Southern point of view. It was the defeated former Confederacy which had to reckon with the specter of defeat, the unsettling of old racial caste norms, the newly enfranchised African-American vote, the attitude of victorious Northerners, and the prospect of having to redefine their place in the very country they fought four years to dismember.

Silber looks at the story from the perspective of the white North. She finds that in many ways, this is actually a gender history--Northerners, as she points out, had their own anxieties and fears to work out, and they did so partly by casting the South as a feminine contrast to their own presumed masculine mastery and strength.

At the same time, white Northern attitudes towards freedmen would shift along with anxieties about working class agitation and concerns about increased levels of immigration--the notion that Southern whites might understand "the Negro problem" best allowed Northerners both to cease worrying about the consequences of abandoning Reconstruction and it promises, and to allow Southern whites a subsidiary but respectable role in enforcing social and political harmony in "their" section of the country.

Ben Tillman & The Reconstruction of White Supremacy

Stephen Kantrowitz. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Ben Tillman was a key political figure in South Carolina from late Reconstruction through the early Progressive Era. Beginning as a terrorist opposing Reconstruction rule and Black political participation, he parlayed his early prominence as an unapologetic leader of the "Red Shirt" militias into a long career as a Democratic Party operative, Governor, and finally several terms in the US Senate. Well known as one of the leading figures in the campaign to restore white supremacy and create the Jim Crow state, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman proudly and shrewdly deployed his propensity for violence both rhetorical and physical to back him his national image as a crude but determined representative of the common (white) man.

Kantrowitz approaches Tillman's career from two vantage points. On the one hand, he considers the ways in which Tillman and his supporters conceptualized "whiteness". Tillman applied both racial and gendered facets to his conception of what made a truly "White" man. Tillman based his notion of whiteness on a Jeffersonian producerist idealization of the independent white farmer.

This played into the second facet of Tillman's life--his frequent rhetorical flirtations with radicalism and agrarian populism. Many observers at the time assumed Tillman was a Populist and even a Progressive (early in his career he promoted agricultural reform and education), and many historians and biographers since have followed suit. But Kantrowitz points out that Tillman himself was actually a substantial landowner (and the son of a planter) rather than one of the simple farmers he claimed to champion. More importantly, his commitment to agrarian reform and Progressive measures was severely limited by his primary commitment--to white supremhacy as he understood it. Maintaining the latter meant often sacrificing the best interests of many common whites, for fear of empowering or allowing a political opening to African-Americans.

In the end, Tillman's brand of white supremacy could only be maintained at a heavy cost--a willingness to engage in violence against both Blacks and Whites who failed to adhere to rigidly defined social roles would be coupled with a serious undermining of democratic participation, and economic stagnation. Tillman died feeling pessimistic that his system could survive. He was right, but it would take several more decades and much more suffering before his toxic legacy of a politically and legally enforced formal caste system would be undone.

Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877

David O. Stowell. Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

The Great Strike of 1877 has long served as an important "periodizational" function, providing a dramatic break between the Reconstruction era (which formally ended that same year with the deal which put Hayes in the White House) and the Gilded Age. Given the degree to which the Gilded Age was marked by frequent labor strife and intermittent major strikes, the neatness of this temporal demarcation is almost too good to be true.

But while the utility of the Great Strike as a milestone event is nearly impossible to argue with, David Stowell argues that traditional interpretations of the Great Strike as a spontaneous outbreak of working-class unity should not be accepted as settled fact. He argues that while traditional interpretations have approached the strike from a labor history perspective, the widespread public support generated by the original railroad strike wasn't necessarily a matter of working class solidarity.

He compares three Erie Canal cities--Buffalo Syracuse, and Albany--which experienced different levels of intensity, violence, and public support. By comparing reports and arrest records with maps, he regards the Great Strike from the perspective of urban history and also spatial history, he persuasively argues a counter-narrative in which most participants in the Great Strike were local residents and business owners who wanted to resist the intrusion of railroads into urban spaces and streets. Railroads were a constant menace to safety and quality of life, and they had on often detrimental effect on local economic activity as well.

Stowell acknowledges that his argument is somewhat speculative, but then again he points out that the traditional labor history interpretations relied largely on statements, speeches, and rhetorical assumptions.

The Incorporation of America

Alan Trachtenberg. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, 2007.

Trachtenberg's study straddles the fields of history and culture, coming from a point of view which attempted to analyze the development of the United States in ways which transcended rigid interpretive frameworks. In the Preface to this 25th Anniversary edition he notes that when the book was first published in 1982, "American Studies" was then a more "transgressive enterprise." (xiv) Even now, the book has a breadth of reach which sets it apart from many more traditional historical monographs.

"Incorporation" is most commonly used in the context of creating a business, and while Trachtenberg is using the term in a much broader sense--both in the sense of creating a unity out of parts as well as the sense of creating a body or a "person"--he deliberately plays on that common understanding by saying that America was "incorporated" because in many ways the cultural transformation the nation and its people went through at that time were driven by the aggressive growth of industrial capitalism and attendant phenomena, including mechanization, urban growth, the rapid opening of western land to cash-crop based agricultural, the spread of railroads, the development of finance capital, and so on.

Trachtenberg depicts the people of the United States grappling with complex, sometimes logically conflicting, notions of identity and purpose. Their society still spoke the language of stable Republican virtue and the moral economy of self-sufficient producers, but they were being driven to participate in an aggressive capitalist cycle of dynamic, creative destructive, and towards becoming consumers of mass-produced goods which were advertised in ways which turned products into abstractions tied to personal desires and detached from the act of manufacture.

This was a country where politics became a matter of fierce partisan rivalry masking a complete detachment of the Federal government from substantive action in the national economy--as in so many other areas of American society, politicians found themselves being "incorporated" into an America where the big economic questions increasingly were addressed only from the outside, by dissident groups such as the Populists who struggled to articulate new grievances in language befitting the new order.

Reconstruction as a Process of Statist Freedom

Gregory P. Downs. After Apomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

It has been several decades since historians began the long process of redeeming the memory of Reconstruction from the dustbin the era had been consigned to by the Dunning school and subsequent scholars. It is no longer unthinkable, perhaps not even all that controversial, to argue that the era was marked by a noble, if ultimately limited and in many ways failed, experiment in expanding freedom. Reconstruction is no longer seen as a period of corruption and misrule imposed upon a defeated white Southern population, but rather as the first Civil Rights movement in American history.

But according to Downs, an important aspect of Reconstruction has been left out of the picture--the role of the military. While most historians of the period recognize there was such as thing as "military reconstruction" that understanding largely focuses on the role of the army in specific policing actions,and as the byproduct of a period in which the Federal government struggled to create new civic institutions and to populate political positions in the former Confederacy. Downs argues that the army played a much more central and proactive role in the period. This was made possible by an important fact that most histories get wrong--the Civil War did not end at Appomattox; in fact, it did not for several years after Lee surrendered to Grant. The lack of open warfare between formal armies, and the vanquishing of the Confederacy as a functioning polity meant the end of large-scale combat, but a formal, legal state of war existed until 1868 in most former CSA states, and until 1871 in a few others, finishing in Georgia. Until States were readmitted into the Union--under conditions imposed on them--and their elected representatives were seated in Congress, Republicans would insist that a state of war existed.

This didn't merely give the army an increased role in the enforcement of civil law--it some cases it meant that the army created law, and acted as the final arbiter of legal and judicial authority. In essence, the fact of martial law created the space for Republicans--both Radical and moderates, and even many conservatives--to rally together and take steps which in peacetime would have been impossible. The conditions of war allowed Republicans intent on stamping out white Southern insurgency and defending African-American (and white Republican) lives to go beyond the limits of the Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed under circumstances which would not have passed Constitutional muster in normal times.

But Republicans and many in the army argued that as Reconstruction was not a normal time, they had both the opportunity and the obligation to go beyond the legal powers of the Constitution in order to save their conception of how it should work. In the Introduction, Downs writes "Constitutional protections that we still take for granted--due process, equal protection, birthright citizenship, the vote--were by-products of martial law." (2) The state of war gave Republicans the extra-legal space in which to expand the definition of citizenship and rights beyond all Antebellum norms. The presence of the army gave force to these experiments--it also gave physical, tangible support to freedmen's collective aspirations and bold experiments in building civic institutions and political organizations in the shadows of their former masters and the white society which had kept them enslaved prior to the arrival of liberating soldiers.

The experience of relying on the army to defend and support efforts and asserting political and economic freedom in the face of stiff and violent resistance meant that African-Americans in the South came to understand the role of government as being a defender of freedom and the basis of its implementation. This statist conception of liberty was completely at odds with the libertarian notion of the importance of freedom from government which was the ideological basis of the Democratic Party which would lead the assault on the political, social, and economic gains created during Reconstruction.

Downs admits that there are hard questions to consider in this story. The gains of Reconstruction were made through a temporary cession of full Constitutional supremacy. At the same time, recognizing that those gains were significant (if often tenuous and ephemeral) forces the reader to consider the degree to which rights are the product not just of abstract law, but of the plain fact of force and the willingness to use it.

Ruin Nation

Megan Kate Nelson. Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Nelson defines a ruin as "a material whole that has violently broken into parts; enough of these parts must remain in situ, however, that the observer can recognize what they used to be." (2)  She argues that her book is "the first book to consider the evocative power of wartime ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change."  (9)  This book is intended as a cultural history of war drawing from a variety of disciplines and interpretive tracks.

Each of the four chapters considers a different type of "ruin"--cities; individual family homes; forests and trees; and wounded soldiers who suffered the loss of one or more limb, often to battlefield surgeons. The first two were the sort of "ruins" one normally thinks of, while the latter two were living things and therefore it's an interesting conceptual assertion by Nelson. In all four cases, however, she notes a commonality--the particular American experience of ruination would prove ephemeral, as Americans preferred rebuilding to preserving when possible--cities and houses were rebuilt, forests regrew, and disable veterans would eventually die.

The messages that ruins presented, and the narratives created to give them meaning, varied by example as well as time and place, but in general Nelson tries to argue that the very concept of ruination created a physical, visible landscape which Americans grappled with, assigning narrative meaning to lone chimneys (represented destroyed houses) and empty sleeves (representing war amputees) as well as to efforts to repair damage and restore or recreate this new world.

It's not entirely clear from her text that "ruination" is a concept which would have made sense at the time, not in the over-arching sense she gives it. Nor does her book lead from the four different topics to a more cohesive vision at the end. All the same, this is an interesting way of trying to recreate the way in which the war was experienced at the time--a messier reality than the pristine lawns of modern Civil War battlefield sites would suggest.