Millie Ringold had little time for either tumultuous Reconstruction-era politics or Americans’ changing attitudes toward the assimilation of freed slaves into a predominantly white society. Born into slavery back East, she moved to the mining camp of Yogo City, Montana Territory, in the centennial year of 1876. Though initially the only black person and only woman in camp, she was too busy to give it much thought.

Ringold was born in Virginia in 1845. After emancipation, she moved to Washington, D.C., there working as a nurse and servant for Major Nelson B. Switzer of the 3rd U.S. Cavalry. In 1876 she came up the Missouri River with the major and his family by steamship to Fort Benton, Montana Territory. A year later, when then Lt. Col. Switzer received transfer orders, Millie elected to remain in the frontier town crowded with hopeful miners.

At the time ramshackle settlements were popping up all across the Montana frontier on the backs of one strike after another. In 1879, when word of a promising follow-up gold strike at Yogo Creek (in the Little Belt Mountains of present-day Judith Basin County) reached Fort Benton, Ringold bought two condemned Army mules, a wagon and a load of provisions (including a barrel of whiskey) and joined the rush. 

In the rough town of Yogo City she opened a small hotel, restaurant and saloon. With the profits she made from that enterprise and such side ventures as taking in laundry, Millie bought and worked her own claims. The hardworking pioneer soon made her first hire, Abraham Carter, the only other black person listed in the 1900 census for the district. If racial slurs were leveled at either of them, witnesses kept their observations to themselves, for no surviving firsthand account reflects any such instance of discrimination.

Growing especially fond of Millie, the miners gave her the sobriquet “Bonanza Queen of Yogo City.” When they gathered at her place, she cheered them by playing her favorite tunes on the mouth harp, hand saw, washboard, dishpan or whatever else was on hand. Her admirers said she could make more music with an empty 5-gallon oil can than others could with a piano. Among her favorite tunes were “Coming Through the Rye” and “Coal Oil Johnny” (a phonetic adaptation of a song from the postwar play Coal Oil Tommy, by John Brougham, with Ringold’s own ribald phrase “bum bum soiree”). While Millie entertained the miners with her music and singing, a greater source of wonderment was her double row of front teeth and two tusklike canines protruding from her lower jaw. They often begged her to open her mouth so they could gawk at the rare dental phenomenon.

Meanwhile, the gold seekers found only scattered nuggets amid shoals of pretty blue pebbles that continually jammed their sluice boxes. Slavishly gold-oriented, the men tossed the nuisance pebbles back into the creek. As the miners drifted away one by one, Millie bought up their claims, certain there remained a seam of gold only she would find. Little did she know, a fortune was washing downriver.

By 1899 a British syndicate, whose investors had discovered the “pretty blue pebbles” to be high-quality sapphires, had opened the English Mine along Yogo Creek (see “Bothersome Blue Pebbles,” by Chuck Lyons, in the February 2019 Wild West). Among those who came to oversee the sapphire mine was 25-year-old Englishman Charles T. Gadsden. Though he had neither the education nor prior experience for the job, he demonstrated unswerving loyalty and superb ability as a manager and was eventually promoted to resident supervisor. He and wife Maude made no friends, nor wanted any, until they met Ringold. When or how they met is unknown, but Charles came to admire Millie for her tough-as-a-bear brawn as she drove her wagon or worked her claims dressed in men’s overalls or skirts made from gunnysacks. Short and squat, she presented quite a sight when driving, perched on the edge of the wagon seat, her feet dangling well above the foot of the driver’s box. On one occasion she drove the wagon straight across an icy river, shouting to her mules “Ho! Go long! Git in da. Pull ’em out!” Witnesses were in awe.

One old-time resident recalled visiting Ringold at home in her Yogo City hotel a few years before her death. “A smile of welcome at once puckered her black face into countless wrinkles and bared two tusklike teeth that pointed upward and kept her mouth from closing,” the friend recalled. “Her eyes were very dark and had a knowing twinkle in their liquid depths.” When Millie became too crippled by age and rheumatism to work her claims or drive her team, she eked out a living taking in washing and raising poultry. On his own initiative, Gadsden had the mine’s wagon and team haul supplies to Millie at no cost.

In December 1906 a visitor found Ringold gravely ill, and the county auditor summoned a doctor from nearby Utica to tend her at the public expense. Accounts of her death vary, but according to Gadsden, “She begged Dr. [Abram] Poska to bury her in old Yogo, and he said, ‘I cannot promise Millie, but I will do my best.’” Despite her wishes, county officials overruled such burial arrangements as too expensive. Charles personally drove the wagon that transported Millie’s body from Yogo City to a plot in the Utica Cemetery. 

On Ringold’s death Montana gained its newest ghost town, for the population at the diggings had dwindled from hundreds in 1879 to a handful and then to one—Millie Ringold, Bonanza Queen of Yogo City.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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In the first years of the 20th century, despite the humiliating constraints of social segregation, thousands of African Americans made a living in show business. In Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Manhattan’s Harlem, there were top-tier vaudeville houses that headlined Black acts for Black audiences, and the Theaters Owners Booking Association signed up Black acts for almost 100 smaller venues around the country that catered to Black audiences. There were night spots like the Cotton Club in Harlem that for White audiences mounted lavish all-Black musical revues and Harlem theaters for full-scale Black musicals.

But the pinnacle was Broadway. As early as 1900, there were all-Black musicals there, but the concept really took off after the Eubie Blake–Nobel Sissle musical Shuffle Along opened in 1921 and ran an astonishing 504 performances. Producers sensed that the high stepping and raucous humor associated with Black performers were a money maker, and over the next decade 22 more all-Black shows opened on Broadway. These shows slotted the Black performers into stereotypical roles of shuffling gait and slurred speech, but they also opened the door for dozens of performers to have lifelong careers that eventually allowed them more dignity.

The money woes of the Great Depression of the 1930s made it tough to find backers for any Broadway shows, and the Shuffle Along type minstrelsy all-Black show virtually disappeared. But by then, two important corners had been turned: top-billed performers such as Paul Robson and Ethel Waters had moved out of the racial show business ghetto to earn star billing in otherwise White shows, and the classic American operas Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts had opened on Broadway, giving African Americans roles as complex three-dimensional human beings.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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Reconstruction is a tough story to tell. The promise was so great and the ending so disappointing. It’s hardly a surprise that it took a century and a half to open a national historical park portraying what happened. In January 2017, a site was established as a national monument and rededicated as Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in 2019. The location is in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, where Reconstruction can be said to have begun and for a long while succeeded. Rich Condon arrived as park ranger a year later, around the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. The temporary closure of the National Park Service site gave him time to acclimate to his new situation and to the touchy subject matter with which he would be dealing.

The attempt to reconstruct the South after the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves didn’t go according to plan. But what was that plan? What were the goals at the start?

Here in the South Carolina Sea Islands, U.S. troops arrived in November 1861. They drive out a large portion of Confederate troops and White plantation owners. What’s left are about 10,000 African Americans. They make up 85–90 percent of the population.

A lot of questions start to surface. The U.S. troops are being asked: Am I free? Can I go to school? Can I carry a rifle? There are goals of providing education, building schools. There’s the goal of eventually arming newly freed African American men. You have the start of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, the first Black regiment to don the U.S. Army uniform. Things like land ownership and labor reform. All that’s part of Reconstruction.

What’s special about this site is that all that stuff happens here starting in 1862 through the rest of the war, when it isn’t really happening in many other places throughout the South. This becomes what historians have called a rehearsal for Reconstruction. All those goals are outlined here, and they attempt to execute them during the postwar period in many other places across the South. The success rate varies. Here, it’s a massive success. It takes hold and lasts probably the longest of anywhere.

How did the grand designs for Reconstruction go wrong?

For a long time, Reconstruction was portrayed as a failure. It wasn’t a failure. It was defeated. It was dismantled and defeated in large part by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League—groups of White supremacists who did not want to see African Americans in U.S. Army uniforms. Seeing them in a position of authority didn’t sit well for people who used to call a lot of these men “property.”

Reconstruction takes root and is doing well for a while. In most places it’s lasting 12-plus years. If you look at most definitions of Reconstruction, people look at it beginning with the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and ending about 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes is elected president and pulls U.S. troops from the South.

Here we have a much broader definition. We start in 1861 with the arrival of U.S. troops and we extend it to about 1900, because even in the 1880s and 1890s, there are Black public officials being elected to office. Where it goes wrong is some of these more isolated areas like the South Carolina Upcountry, where you have the Klan presence—White supremacist violence and voter intimidation. In many parts of the North, White Northerners were losing interest in Reconstruction. All these are contributing factors to the process going into a steady decline.

In the end, what were the most significant changes, good and bad?

We see the legacy of Reconstruction in a lot of different places, even into the 20th and 21st century. Some of the good changes: African American land ownership. African American citizenship. “Citizenship” was defined largely by Black U.S. military veterans from the Civil War before 1868. Before the passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868, “citizenship” was not clearly defined.

The bad side is that at the end of Reconstruction, you have the start of the Jim Crow era, which lasts well into the 1960s. Here in South Carolina, the 1868 state constitution was a restructuring of society. It allowed African American men to vote. It extended public education to everybody, regardless of sex or race. Almost 30 years later, in 1895, a new constitution is passed in which segregation is codified, in which African Americans are seen as less than citizens and are largely disenfranchised. This was happening across the South at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, and the ripple effects of that last much longer than people like to remember.

This is one of the newest national historical parks. Can you talk about how it came to be?

There was plenty of interest in the local community of having a park here addressing Reconstruction. Broad and diverse support ranged from community leadership to churches to average citizens. They have a vested interest in this story being told.

This site was established initially as a national monument through an executive order in January 2017, and it becomes a national historical park in March 2019. And really what that did was allow for the expansion of this story. It allowed for the establishment of the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, which is operated by the park. We have national parks across the country that are part of this network. We also have sites that are not managed by the federal government that have a Reconstruction story to tell. It allows this story to become more familiar to people across the nation.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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How do you manage to maintain a balance in your portrayal of controversial subject matter like this?

We talk about the hopes and successes of Reconstruction, but we also talk about the dismantling, and that includes things like racial violence, attacks on African Americans and their allies in the South. We talk about the reactions to things like African American progress, to moving from the state of enslavement to freedom to working toward equality. I think we give it a fair treatment, which in other places it had not been given in a long time.

I’ll note that we didn’t have a lot of violent push back on the Sea Islands during Reconstruction. That’s because the population remains about 90 percent African American, so you don’t have groups like the Klan or the Red Shirts operating. You also didn’t have bridges that connect these islands to the mainland until the 1920s.

Can you describe briefly what’s most important about each of the distinct sites that make up the park?

We have three, you could say three or four, sites. We have our main visitor center in downtown Beaufort. There is a plethora of things we can cover here, one of them being African American financial autonomy. The Freedman’s Bank, one of the first in the nation, is still standing. We can talk about land ownership and labor reform. The majority of the homes and lots in this area are African American–owned by 1864–1865.

Out on Saint Helena Island, a 15-minute drive from here, we have the Penn Center Historic Landmark District. We operate a site there called Darrah Hall, and we also have an easement agreement with Brick Baptist Church right across the road. At Darrah Hall, education is the big story. The people who attended classes there at Penn School, who were enslaved just a couple of months earlier, were prevented by law from learning to read and write. This is their first opportunity to change that. Knowledge is power. That’s the last thing a plantation owner wants the people he calls “property” to have.

The last one is Camp Saxton, down in Port Royal, about 4 miles south of here. This is the site where the 1st South Carolina was recruited and trained for service, the first Black men to wear the U.S. Army uniform.

You learn, in a larger sense, how military service, especially for African Americans, is kind of this direct pathway toward citizenship. During Reconstruction, when the nation’s trying to figure out who deserves citizenship, 200,000-plus African American veterans raised their hands: we fought for this country and prevented it from falling apart.

Here is also the site where about 5,000 African Americans gathered on January 1, 1863, for an impartation of the Emancipation Proclamation. They’re hearing the words that declare their freedom for the first time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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A handsome stone church, nestled in the intersection of Fairfax and South Washington streets, embodies the central history of this “little city” in Northern Virginia. Established in the early 1730s as a member of the official Church of England, the then-wood church became known as the one “near the falls” of the Potomac River, and soon thereafter as “The Falls Church,” a name adopted by the community that developed around it and the city itself when it was incorporated in the 20th century. George Washington was an early vestry member and participated in the decision-making that led to the building of the current, Georgian-style stone structure with Palladian windows, completed in 1769.

Located just six miles from Washington, D.C., and settled by many northern colonists, the city’s population was divided in 1861 over secession and many left town when the state of Virginia ultimately voted in favor of it. Confederates occupied the town and the church until silently withdrawing in September 1861 to Centreville, Va. By 1862, the Federals had moved in to occupy the town, the neighboring high grounds at Munson’s and Upton’s Hills, and the church, which was used as a hospital and later a stable.

Confederate Ranger Colonel John S. Mosby reigned terror over the city, conducting raids of it throughout the summer and fall of 1864. In October, his men shot and killed Frank Brooks, a Black member of the highly unusual interracial Falls Church Home Guard, and kidnapped and later killed abolitionist John Read, who is buried in the Falls Church Cemetery. A visit to the church and its cemetery are a must for history enthusiasts on any tour of Falls Church. A half dozen Civil War Trails signs lay mostly within walking distance and will bring you along the city’s journey from sleepy colonial town, through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and to its reemergence as a metropolitan provision for the capital of the United States.

Written in Stone
115 E. Fairfax St.

Several memorial stones lay within the Falls Church Episcopal Church Cemetery to commemorate its history, especially during the Civil War. The New York Memorial Stone commemorates New York soldiers buried in the churchyard, including many who died while camped at nearby Upton’s Hill. Some of their remains have been removed to Arlington National Cemetery or family plots. A separate memorial stone in the graveyard commemorates Union soldiers buried here and another commemorates Confederate soldiers buried here, including several unknown. Two poignant markers lay at the head of the walkway leading to the church, including one for James Wren, who designed the church and one “with gratitude and repentance” to honor “the enslaved people whose skills and labor helped build The Falls Church.”

Fort Taylor Park
15 N. Roosevelt St.

On June 22, 1861, Thaddeus Lowe and 15 men arrived here, at the site of Taylor’s Tavern, with his balloon Enterprise. Earlier that day, Lowe and his team had inflated it at the Washington Gas Works. Over the next three days, Lowe made several tethered ascents, the first aerial reconnaissance in American military history. Over a 34-day period that summer, Lowe made 23 flights from nearby Fort Corcoran and Ball’s Cross Roads (present-day Ballston). These ascents drew the first rifled artillery fire at a balloon from Confederate positions.

Galloway Methodist Church Cemetery
306 Annandale Rd.

In 1867, African Americans built Galloway United Methodist Church and established the historic cemetery here. According to local tradition, before and during the Civil War, enslaved people on the Dulany plantation secretly worshiped in the grove of trees at the center of the cemetery. Those buried here include Harriet and George Brice and Charles Lee, a free man of color, who served in the 10th USCI. A large grave marker notes the burial site of Eliza Hicks Henderson, who escaped bondage after the Battle of Vicksburg in 1863, and walked from Vicksburg to Washington, D.C., to rejoin her family. She concealed her young son, William Henderson, in a trunk.

Cherry Hill Farmhouse 312 Park Ave.

Although soldiers repeatedly overran and raided Cherry Hill Farm during the Civil War, this circa 1845 farmhouse and the 1856 barn behind it survived almost intact. William Blaisdell of Massachusetts paid $4,000 for the 66-acre property in 1856. The migration of Northerners to this area resulted in a populace of mixed loyalties on the eve of the Civil War. Blaisdell and 25 others in the Falls Church District voted against secession in the statewide referendum held on May 23, 1861, while 44 voted in favor. The Blaisdells, like most families in town, felt the effects of both Confederate and Union occupation. Cherry Hill offers free tours of the farmhouse Saturday mornings, April through October, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. Private tours can also be scheduled year round. cherryhillfallschurch.org

Northside Social
205 Park Ave.

The original house here, “Cloverdale” has late–18th century roots and once faced the Leesburg & Alexandria Turnpike. It saw its fair share of marauding armies during the Civil War, and by the 20th century the building was home to the American Legion Post 225. After years of neglect, instead of demolition, the structure was adaptively reused into the restaurant and cafe it is today. If you are lucky you can catch one of their afternoon tea events. www.northsidesocialva.com/location/falls-church

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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In 1858, Abraham Lincoln casually and unknowingly created a time capsule of his contemporary mindset on both slavery and race relations—not hidden in a cornerstone but taking the form of a 3.25- by 5.78-inch black campaign notebook shared with Capt. James N. Brown, a longtime friend and fellow campaigner.

It was the waning days of Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and Brown was running for Illinois state legislature, partly at Lincoln’s encouragement. Brown, however, was assailed for his ties to Lincoln. Virulent opponents said that Lincoln—and therefore Brown, by association—supported and wanted to bring about social and political Negro equality.

Brown beseeched Lincoln for a clear statement on that Negro equality, what Brown referred to as the “paramount issue” of the day. Lincoln acceded, annotating what he called a “scrapbook” with news clips of his speeches on the subject, and a definitive 8-page letter, transcribed here.

Brown used the notebook from Lincoln during his campaign’s waning days. It didn’t help. He lost the election.

The scrapbook was cherished by Brown and, after his 1868 death, by his sons William and Benjamin. Eventually they sold it to New York rare-book dealer George D. Smith, who found a customer in Philadelphia Lincoln collector William H. Lambert, who believed Lincoln’s words warranted wider distribution and published a version of the notebook in 1901 as Abraham Lincoln: His Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original with an Explanatory Note by J. McCan Davis.

After Lambert’s death the ‘scrapbook’ was auctioned in 1914; and purchased for Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino, California library.

In his career Ross E. Heller, holder of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has been a journalist, U.S. Senatorial press secretary, lobbyist, association executive, entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and now, editor/author. Researching this book, he is also discoverer of new facts of America’s most-storied life; a life about which no one could imagine anything new could ever be found.

This article is an excerpt from By Abraham Lincoln: His 1858 Time Capsule, edited by Ross E. Heller and published by CustomNEWS, Seaside Books.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

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Elizabeth Caroline Butler

(1837–1911)

Born in Autaugaville, Ala., on October 7, 1837, Elizabeth Butler had, as a young girl, traveled west with her parents, extended family, and neighbors. At 18, she married Allan T. Daniel in Lauderdale County, Miss., and the following year gave birth to a daughter, Nancy. While pregnant with her second child—a son they would name Henry—Elizabeth traveled with her husband to the community of Eutaw in Limestone County, Texas, where he began working as a farmer and rancher. In early 1860, she would be blessed with twin boys, George and William.

Having to take care of four small children and managing the day-to-day struggles on the frontier was demanding enough, but Elizabeth was about to experience even more discord with the untimely death of her husband that April. The death of a spouse on the frontier was a common occurrence, of course, and Elizabeth did what many such widows did and remarried, this time to dry goods merchant and postal worker Isaac Ellison, nine years her senior.

To defend the Lone Star State’s interests during the war, Texans enlisted in droves at their county seats. Younger, unmarried men were usually the first to go, but Isaac was eventually among those called to duty. In his absence, Elizabeth strove to keep the dry goods store and post office running, while continuing to juggle being a full-time parent.

She had no respite in managing these commitments, and it didn’t help that money was difficult to come by. At this time, each Texas county issued its own paper currency. As the war progressed, Eutaw alternated within the jurisdiction of three counties: Limestone, Falls, and Robertson. County money soon became more worthless than regular Texas and Confederate script, leading to economic collapse.

As it did for communities and states across the country, four years of war decimated Texas’ male population. Having fought predominantly in Colonel James B. Likens’ Bloody 35th Texas Cavalry, Isaac would be one Lone Star boy fortunate enough to return home. —William Joseph Bozic

Charles Carleton Coffin

(1823–1896)

While writing for The Boston Journal during the Civil War, Charles Carleton Coffin was told by his editor to always “keep the Journal at the front.” In that, Coffin succeeded. Based in Washington, D.C., he first made a name for himself traveling into the field with what became the Army of the Potomac. His coverage of the Union army’s retreat at the First Battle of Bull Run, in fact, remains his most extensively quoted piece.

At Fredericksburg in December 1862, a Union soldier expressed amazement at seeing “Carleton” beneath a tree under fire, still writing away. The following spring and summer, Coffin followed the Union army to Gettysburg and ended up traveling 100 miles on horseback and 800 more by train to get accounts to the Journal’s readers.

During the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, Coffin had his nephew hurry his account to the presses in Washington. Ride as fast as you can, he urged; just don’t kill the horse. “If he is behind, his occupation is gone,” Coffin told his fellow war reporters (“specials,” as they were called). The “account must be the first, or among the first, or it is nothing.” If a reporter were to miss the mail or the train, he observed, “he might as well put his pencil in his pocket and go home.”

Coffin was one of more than 300 Northern correspondents to cover the war, earning about $25 a week. He shared with his colleagues a common set of vexations, such as the horse-stealing that frequently bedeviled field correspondents. On several occasions, Coffin’s servant greeted him in the morning, “Breakfast is ready, Mr. Coffin. Your horse is gone again.”

It is no surprise that Coffin’s name has a prominent place among Northern reporters inscribed on the War Correspondents Memorial Arch at Maryland’s Gathland State Park near Burkittsville. —Stephen Davis

Peter Bauduy Garesché

(1822–1868)

The authors of the 2007 book Never for Want of Powder make a compelling case that the Augusta (Ga.) Powder Works and its creator, Colonel George W. Rains, were instrumental to the Confederate Army’s survival as the war endured. Rains, however, had a counterpart in the Confederate Navy who shouldn’t be overlooked: Peter Bauduy Garesché.

Garesché’s father and uncle were French emigres who owned and operated a gunpowder mill in Wilmington, Del. The family were business partners of and relatives by marriage to the DuPonts of Wilmington’s famed DuPont Powder Mill family. Peter worked with his father in the mills as a youngster but eventually embarked on a career as a lawyer in St. Louis.

The Civil War divided the Garesché family. Peter’s cousin and close friend Julius Garesché, a fellow classmate at Georgetown University and a West Point graduate, remained loyal to the Union. Although Peter was a Southern sympathizer, he was not a secessionist, according to family sources. But when ordered to take a loyalty oath, he went south.

It helped also that he had strong Confederate contacts—General Joseph E. Johnston was his brother-in-law—and when the Confederate Navy was looking for someone to run its newly created powder works in Columbia, S.C., Garesché was chosen. It was a prescient decision.

Garesché was applauded for conducting the Columbia Naval Powder Works with “singular skill and commensurate results,” and for supplying the Southern Navy with gunpowder “of excellent quality.” Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who had known Peter while both were in St. Louis, purportedly told a friend: “I would, if I caught him, keep him close and not exchange him for 10,000 men. The powder he manufactures for the South is so superior to ours.”

After the war, Garesché resumed his law practice in St. Louis. He died in 1868. —Bruce Allardice

Mother Mary Hyacinth

(1816–1897)

In 1855, 39-year-old Madeline LeConniat, better known as Mother Mary Hyacinth, traveled to central Louisiana from her native France to open a convent and school along with nine other Daughters of the Cross. Louisiana would prove a harsh climate for her, often leaving her under the weather. The mosquitoes, she wrote, “[besiege] me continually because my blood which still smells European attracts them.” A lack of conversational English also hindered her local relations.

The Civil War increased already hard times with inflated pricing. Food and other supplies were in short supply, causing tense conditions for the nuns, students, and refugees alike. Troops from both sides constantly passed through the area, putting demands on their meager supplies.

The worst came during the Battle of Mansura on May 16, 1864, a contest featuring an artillery duel in which stray shots damaged the convent’s structures. In addition, soldiers looted the rations of the nuns and their wards. Relentlessly, Mother Hyacinth secured donations from the area’s residents to keep matters operating smoothly. She fervently kept the school running and still offered shelter to displaced individuals and families.

After the war, Mother Hyacinth continued to serve the convent and the neighborhood until 1867 when the motherhood discontinued its support of the Louisiana mission. Two years later, Mother Hyacinth was reelected mother superior and called back to Louisiana. She continued her community work without the support of the French motherhouse.

In 1882, at age 65, Mother Hyacinth returned to France to run the American novitiate until her death in 1897 at age 81. The Daughters of the Cross continued to operate schools throughout Louisiana into the next century, capitalizing on the sterling examples set by Mother Mary Hyacinth. —Edward Windsor

Martin Jackson

(Unknown)

As the Battle of Pleasant Hill, La., raged on April 9, 1864, Colonel Augustus Buchel of the 1st Texas Cavalry dismounted his troops and ordered them to attack the Federal infantry. Remaining on horseback, however, Buchel was an easy target and soon fell mortally wounded with seven injuries.

Two days later, Buchel died in the arms of a 17-year-old slave named Martin Jackson, a self-described “black Texan,” who lamented: “I had pitched up a kind of first-aid station. I remember standing there and thinking the South didn’t have a chance. All of a sudden I heard someone call. It was a soldier, who was half carrying Col. Buchel in. I [couldn’t] do nothing for the Colonel. He was too far gone. I just held him comfortable and that was the position he was in when he stopped breathing. He was a friend of mine.”

Martin and his father had followed their owner, Alva Fitzpatrick, to war to serve as cooks. Martin was also a stretcher-bearer, which he referred to as “an official lugger-in of men that got wounded.” Although Martin conceded, “I knew the Yanks were going to win from the beginning. I wanted them to win and lick us Southerners,” he also “hoped they was going to do it without wiping out my company.”

He remained fiercely loyal to the men of the 1st Texas throughout the war, continuing to cook for the men and tend the wounded. After the war, he was freed, became a cowboy, married, and eventually had 15 children. He even served as a cook in World War I, proudly claiming he never donned a uniform in either conflict. Martin’s one regret during the war—he started the deadly 75-year habit of smoking tobacco. —Fran Cohen

Cyrus Hall McCormick 

(1809–1884)

Cyrus Hall McCormick, one of the United States’ great early industrialists, founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago in 1847. Although he was merely one of several entrepreneurs to invent a mechanical reaper, his company’s Chicago home, as well as his family’s business acumen, quickly made his version the nation’s most successful and widely used harvester, critically helping open the Midwest and Great Plains to family farmers in the decade leading up to the Civil War.

Born February 15, 1809, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, McCormick was the eldest of eight children raised by Robert McCormick Jr. and Mary Ann Hall. Robert McCormick had attempted to design and build a mechanical reaper of his own during Cyrus’ youth, but it proved not to be a sturdy, reliable model. Building upon his father’s failures, as well as an unpatented successful version by Scottish inventor Patrick Bell, Cyrus succeeded in constructing a reliable reaper in 1831. He continued working on improving this model and finally received his first patent in 1834.

Two years after Cyrus established the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company with one of his brothers, Leander, another brother—William—joined them in Chicago. William’s business insight and Cyrus’ skilled salesmanship helped the company flourish.

Cyrus, however, suffered a stroke in 1880 and spent the last four years of his life as an invalid before passing away in Chicago on May 13, 1884. In 1902, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company was absorbed into the International Harvester Company. —Terry Beckenbaugh

John Other Day

(1819-1869)

“When I gave up the war path and commenced working the earth for a living, I discarded all my former habits,” John Other Day once wrote. “It was very hard for me to learn the white man’s ways, but I was determined to get my living by cultivating the land and raising stock.”

Born Ampatutokacha (i.e., Good Sounding Voice) in 1819, Other Day had been a fierce warrior in his youth, but his conversion to Christianity led him to join an association of “farmer Indians” in 1856. The following year, Other Day assisted in the rescue of a young female captive, and in 1859 he was nominated to a treaty delegation sent to Washington, D.C. While on that trip, he met an English woman working at his hotel whom he later wed.

On August 18, 1862, Dakota Indians, upset with living conditions on their federal reservation in Minnesota, killed several settlers and traders during an armed attack on the Lower Sioux Agency, igniting the 39-day Dakota War of 1862. Other Day hurriedly gathered up 62 settlers (men, women, and children alike) and secured them in an Agency building overnight, personally standing guard at the door. Early the next morning, he guided the group on an arduous, three-day trek across the Minnesota River and through a prairie to safety in St. Paul, where he was welcomed as a hero. Wanting to further assist his new community, Other Day volunteered as a civilian scout for the U.S. troops assembled to combat the hostile Indians, often fighting side by side with his newfound comrades.

The U.S. government awarded Other Day $2,500 for his heroism. He bought a farm in Henderson, Minn., but later sold it and moved to the Dakota Territory. He would die of tuberculosis on October 19, 1869, at the Fort Wadsworth hospital in what became the state of South Dakota 20 years later. —Richard H. Holloway

Phoebe Levy Pember

(1823–1913)

In April 1861, there was no reason to expect Phoebe Levy Pember would leave the mark on the Civil War that she did. Born into a prominent Jewish family in Charleston, S.C., she had spent the antebellum years in relative comfort, the well-off wife of a gentile, Thomas Noyes Pember, whom she married in 1856. As the nation formally began its split, however, her husband contracted tuberculosis, and she was widowed three months into the war. With no children and few career options, she relented to residing with her parents in Marietta, Ga. There she struggled, directionless and frequently at odds with her father.

That changed in November 1862 when Pember received an offer from the wife of Confederate Secretary of War George Randolph to move to Richmond to become “matron” of the capital city’s Chimborazo Hospital. Despite no previous nursing experience, Pember proved a providential choice for the position. According to the “Jewish Women’s Archive,” she “oversaw nursing operations as well as housekeeping and food and maintained a friendly but firm authority, loved for her feminine charms and her dedication to her patients.” That did not prevent her from pulling a gun on a hospital worker trying to pilfer whiskey from the hospital’s supplies.

Pember remained as Chimborazo’s first appointed female administrator until Richmond fell in April 1865. In 1879, she penned the book A Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confederate Richmond, and in 1995 the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a stamp, featuring a painting of Pember feeding one of her patients chicken soup.

As historian James Robertson Jr. remembered: “Mrs. Pember was an aristocrat who developed a deep affection for the common soldiers and the class from which they came. She lived to be 89, but nothing in her life matched the three years of devoted service she gave to the human debris of war. Her only memorial were the looks of thankfulness that came from suffering soldiers who stretched out a hand for help—and found Phoebe Pember.” —Gregg Phillipson

Emma Sansom Johnson

(1847–1900)

The Yankees were several miles ahead, with Nathan Bedford Forrest in earnest pursuit. A deep stream blocked the way, however. Where could he cross—and who would show the way?

It was late April 1863, and a 2,000-man mounted column under Colonel Abel Streight had ridden to northwest Alabama to wreck as many Confederate railroads as possible. On the morning of May 2, the Federals burned the bridge across Black Creek, north of Gadsden, Ala., believing it would stall Forrest long enough for them to get away.

The “Wizard of the Saddle” wasn’t stymied, though. A local girl, 16-year-old Emma Sansom, knew of a nearby ford. Forrest eagerly hoisted her onto his saddle as she pointed the way. After crossing the creek, the Confederates chased Streight and his troopers so determinedly that he surrendered his command the next day.

Forrest was quick to credit the lass with his success, writing her a note of thanks from his “Hed Quarters in Sadle.” Emma quickly became a local heroine. She married the next year, and after the war moved to Texas, where she died in 1900.

Seven years later, Gadsden residents unveiled a statue to her that, despite recent discussions of taking it down, remains standing—with Emma’s right arm held aloft, her index finger pointing of course to that famed Black Creek ford. —John Gordon

Fritz Tegener

(1813–unknown)

A Prussian immigrant, Fritz Tegener lived in the Texas Hill Country town of Comfort, a community started by recent German immigrants embroiled in the political unrest of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. Few German Texans owned slaves, and the people of Comfort were openly opposed to secession when the Civil War began, unwilling to participate in another such conflict.

Before the war, Tegener had been politically active in Comfort, serving as a jurist and county treasurer. That would continue during the Civil War. To protect the community from both Indian raids and the Confederacy, Tegener and other residents formed what was called the Union Loyal League.

After the Conscription Act of 1862 passed, Confederate soldiers began harassing the German Texans to join the Army, spurring more than 60 to organize a group that would travel south to Mexico to avoid conscription and appointing Tegener their leader. The ensemble departed in the summer of 1862, pursued by 94 Confederates as it traversed the rugged terrain of southwest Texas.

On August 10, 1862, the Confederates caught the Germans on the banks of the Nueces River and a battle ensued, known as the Massacre on the Nueces, in which 19 Unionists were killed and nine, too injured to escape, left behind and captured. Confederates executed their prisoners and left all 28 bodies unburied.

Though wounded, Tegener escaped and led the remaining Germans to Mexico, only to be ambushed by another Confederate group while crossing the Rio Grande. Eight more died.

Tegener spent the rest of the war in Mexico, but returned home afterward. Later, women of Comfort collected the sun-bleached bones from the battlefield and buried them under the only German language monument dedicated to the Union in the South named Treǔe der Union (Loyalty to the Union). Tegener risked his life to defend his political beliefs and find refuge for young German men of the Texas Hill Country. —Charles Grear

Alice Thompson

(1846–1869)

The ferocity of conflict often leads one to accomplish the unexpected. During the Battle of Thompson’s Station, Tenn., on March 5, 1863, teenager Alice Thompson—a progeny of the settlement’s namesake—made a split-second decision that helped change the course of an eventual Confederate victory.

Life had begun as usual that late-winter day, but Alice soon found herself caught in the midst of a desperate fray. Serving as Confederate physicians, Alice’s father as well as her beau remained near the front. She meanwhile fled her home, seeking protection for the rest of her family and finding refuge in the cellar of a neighbor, Confederate Lieutenant Thomas Banks. From the basement windows, she was able to catch glimpses of the conflict.

As the fighting intensified, Alice confronted a decisive moment. Having watched repeated Union advances and Confederate counterattacks, she became distressed watching a Southern flag-bearer fall to the ground. Forsaking her safety, Alice scrambled from the hiding place and made her way to the fallen soldier, grabbing the regimental colors—those of the 3rd Arkansas Cavalry—he had been carrying. Proudly holding the colors high, she drew the attention of Confederate troops, who were inspired by the recklessly courageous undertaking and rallied to push the Yankees back. Even with shells exploding around her, Alice reportedly never flinched as the Confederates advanced. Retreating Union troops were among those who admired her incredible bravery.

Finally, others concerned for Alice’s well-being pulled her back to the cellar. Her heroics did not end there, however. With Banks’ house serving as a hospital, she helped tend the wounded.

Alice Thompson died in 1869, only 23, but her gallantry at Thompson’s Station secured her place in Civil War history and memory. —Heidi Weber

Julia Wilbur

(1815–1895)

Julia Wilbur’s life easily could have slipped into historical anonymity. After years of a rather conventional rural life of teaching school and tending to the needs and wants of various members of a large and extended family, the spirited and socially aware Wilbur found herself caught up in the evangelical spirit burning through western New York. Residing in the environs of Rochester brought her into contact with prominent abolitionists and social reformers who, in the decades prior to the Civil War, advocated various forms of social and political change. Becoming a member of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society (RLASS) in 1852 probably rescued Wilbur from the life of an unassuming spinster and transformed her, at age 47, into an energetic social activist just as the nation was slipping into secession and war.

Determined to do more than darn socks and send food packages to the local boys in the Union Army, Wilbur traveled to Washington, D.C., as a representative of the RLASS. At first, she was armed with nothing more than a few general letters of introduction and a heart full of grit and compassion. After arriving on October 28, 1862, she was sent to Alexandria, Va., to do what she could to provide aid and comfort to the thousands of contrabands streaming into the Union-held city.

Nothing had prepared her for the sights, sounds, and, yes, smells she encountered. An entry in her diary described conditions she found upon her arrival: “Went to old School House. 150 C’s [contrabands] there. A large house for sick nearby. We went there, people in filth & rags—a dead child lay wrapped in piece of ticking—in another room, a dead child behind the door. Oh what sights! What Misery! No doctor—no medicines—only rations & Shelter.”

Along with her better-known friend—former slave and abolitionist Harriet Jacobs—Wilbur often encountered stubborn military bureaucracies, unfriendly local citizens, and various disorganized benevolent associations during her unrelenting fight against hunger, disease, and death. For the remainder of the war, Wilbur set about to change the dreadful conditions she found there.

Wilbur lived in Washington after the war and worked as a clerk in the Patent Office from 1869 to 1895, a harbinger of the thousands of women who would follow her into government employment. She remained active in social causes such as voting rights for women. She died on June 6, 1895, and is buried in the family plot in Avon, N.Y. —Gordon Berg

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Contributors:

Dr. Bruce Allardice, author of the “Loose Lips” feature article in ACW’s Spring 2023 issue, teaches history at Illinois’ South Suburban College. He has co-authored several books and articles on the Civil War and on the history of baseball.

Dr. Terry Beckenbaugh is an associate professor of history in the Department of Joint Warfare at U.S. Air Force Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Ala. He is working on a book on the
1862 White River Campaign in Arkansas.

Gordon Berg, who writes from Gaithersburg, Md., is a longtime contributor to America’s Civil War, Civil War Times, and other HistoryNet publications.

William Joseph Bozic Jr., a retired Texas high school social studies teacher, works for the National Park Service in San Antonio. He is married with four children.

Fran Cohen, a freelance author specializing in history , writes from Little Rock, Ark.

Stephen Davis, who specializes in Southern Civil War history, writes from Cumming, Ga.

John Gordon is a freelance author based in Wetumpka, Ala.

Dr. Charles Grear, professor of history at Central Texas College, writes extensively on Texas and the Civil War. He is the author of Why Texans Fought in the Civil War.

Richard H. Holloway, a member of ACW’s editorial advisory board, is a historian who hails from Louisiana.

Gregg Phillipson is a former member of the Texas Holocaust Commission, well known for loaning his large collection of Jewish war memorabilia to museums across Texas. A resident of Austin, he also frequently delivers presentations about Jewish military history.

Dr. Heidi Weber is an associate professor in the SUNY–Orange Department of Global Studies, with specialties in U.S. history, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Edward Windsor, a retired historian and newspaperman, writes from Corinth, Miss.

In late 1862, Horace Washington and Olmsted Massy, former slaves from Virginia, met with a recruiting officer in New Orleans to join the 4th Louisiana Native Guards. The 4th was one of four infantry regiments formed as part of the Louisiana Militia in 1861 to protect New Orleans from Yankee invaders, its initial members free men of color pulled from the Crescent City itself. New Orleans’ capitulation to U.S. Navy Flag Officer David G. Farragut in April 1862, however, did not end the war for the free black soldiers of the 4th Native Guards or the other three regiments, who readily agreed to join the Union Army. After Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler assimilated the regiments into his military chain of command, recruitment was opened to former slaves, hence Washington’s and Massy’s desire to serve.

The two men were mustered in as corporals. At first, Butler used the Native Guard only to conduct guard duty in the vicinity. Eventually they were assigned to protect government facilities in Baton Rouge, but on May 27, 1863, the regiments joined Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks’ troops in combat while storming the Confederates’ Mississippi River stronghold at Port Hudson, La. Though unsuccessful, the black troops proved their mettle in battle.

A week later, the Native Guard regiments were reorganized and given new designations. The 4th was now known as the 4th Regiment U.S. Infantry, Corps d’Afrique—assigned to the 19th Corps’ 1st Division in the Department of the Gulf. After the surrender of Port Hudson on July 9, 1863, the 4th was stationed there to guard captured stores but was soon ordered to garrison Forts Jackson and St. Philip below New Orleans. Duty at those riverside forts was pleasant, as civilians in small boats constantly stopped by to sell the soldiers fresh-picked oranges for a penny each. But on February 20, 1864, the unit was transferred back to Port Hudson.

Another new designation would come a few weeks later. Now known as the 76th United States Colored Infantry, under Colonel Charles W. Drew’s command, the regiment formally became part of the Union Army. That certainly produced a measure of pride for the men in the ranks.

Besides guarding the smaller guns captured at Port Hudson, as the larger weapons had already been removed, the 76th was ordered to man them in case of attack by local Confederate cavalry units. Their post commander, Brig. Gen. John P. Hawkins, complained they were being stretched too thin, however. “There are 367 men in the regiment for duty,” he carped, “which barely supplies sentinels over the guns—the camp guard—with a few remaining for detachment drill at the pieces.”

In February 1865, the 76th served under Hawkins, now commanding a division of USCI troops at Algiers, La., near New Orleans. The 76th was put into the 3rd Brigade of Hawkins’ Division, alongside the 48th and 68th USCI. After a short stint, the 76th was transferred to Barrancas, Fla., temporarily becoming a part of the Federal District of West Florida.

Pensacola was its next destination—the port city in Florida’s panhandle serving as a jumping-off point to assist in the capture of Mobile. Major General E.R.S. Canby (Hawkins’ brother-in-law) assembled as many troops as he could to overtake the largest coastal city still in Confederate hands.

The boredom of constant inactivity in guarding facilities and cities was grating on the troops, who understandably wanted to see some action. At Mobile, their wishes would be granted. Following a few weeks of manning the trenches surrounding the city, the men were informed they were to participate in an upcoming assault on Fort Blakeley.

Wrote Drew:

On the night of April 1, my brigade [including the 76th, currently commanded by Major William E. Nye] was ordered to encamp in line of battle to the right of the Stockton road about two miles and a half from the enemy’s works, which was done in the following order: The Sixty-eight Regiment on the right, the Seventy-Sixth in the center, and the Forty-eighth on the left, the command occupying the advance and extreme right.

The next morning about 7:30 our pickets becoming warmly engaged, I formed line as quickly as possible, when I received an order to advance in line of battle. I immediately ordered two companies from each regiment deployed forward as skirmishers, and commenced the advance, which was continued for two miles through a thickly wooded and broken country, my skirmishers fighting about half the way.

Notwithstanding the numerous obstacles in the way, there was scarcely a break in the line the whole distance. The precision maintained by the line, as well as the bold and steady advance of the skirmishers under heavy fire, were sufficient, I think, to command the admiration of all. Arriving within half a mile of the works I received an order to halt, which was at once communicated to the skirmish line. Our position was then immediately in rear of a ravine about half a mile from the works of the enemy, my right resting on the swamp and my left connecting with General [William A.] Pile’s brigade….

Once halted, Drew’s units began construction of a fortification they named Battery Wilson. A battery of Union artillery moved in behind their position and began bombarding the Confederate position with their four 30-pounder Parrott guns. The artillery pieces later turned their attention to the Confederate gunboats Huntsville and Nashville coming up from Mobile Bay. The noise must have been deafening to the 76th and the rest of their brigade with cannon fire in front of and behind them.

On April 9, Drew noted:

I ordered the Sixty-eight and Seventy-Sixth Regiments (then in the trenches) to double their skirmish lines at 5 p.m. and drive the enemy from his rifle-pits, and if necessary to do it I should order out the regiments entire. Before the work was fairly commenced, however, I heard cheering on my left and saw the skirmishers of the First Brigade advancing. I immediately gave the command forward and forward the entire command (except the Forty-eighth Regiment left in reserve) swept with a yell….Before I could get up with the regiment they had fallen back to the abatis, and when the charge became general they, with the rest, went forward with a shout and did all that brave men could do. The result was soon accomplished and Blakely [sic] was ours. I cannot speak in terms of too much praise of the officers and men of my command. Each and every one did willingly all that was asked, working incessantly night and day a large portion of the time. The support and assistance rendered me by regimental commanders entitles them to my warmest gratitude. I could ask for none better.

“The loss suffered by my command from the investment of the place [Mobile] until its capture is 2 officers killed and 3 wounded; enlisted men, 12 killed and 65 wounded,” noted Major Nye.

The unit occupied Mobile for only a day before making a 12-day march to Montgomery, the Confederacy’s original capital. In June, they were directed to return to New Orleans. Major General Philip Sheridan then had them board steamers to Alexandria, La., to join forces that Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer was assembling for a mission in Texas.

Though not directly part of Custer’s cavalry division in Alexandria, the 76th and the 80th USCI would receive directives from the flamboyant general. Both regiments were to keep the peace in the town and guard governmental stores while Custer tried to train and have several Union cavalry units from different stations in the South work together as a cohesive group before departing for Texas.

Because of the exhaustive summer heat in central Louisiana, Custer had his troopers build brush arbors atop their canvas tents to lessen the sunlight beating down on them. The African American troops were ordered to occupy the cabins across the Red River in Pineville that had been erected by the Confederate forces occupying Forts Randolph and Buhlow in the winter of 1864-65.

“The men hastily constructed small cabins with pine boards [as well as chimneys for cooking],” recalled Confederate Major Winchester Hall. Noted Augustus V. Ball, a surgeon in McMahan’s Texas Battery, which occupied Pineville until their surrender on June 3, 1865, the structures were “roomy and spacious but they leaked badly and flooded frequently.”

Pineville was considerably smaller than Alexandria but was spared the burning of its counterpart town across the river by retreating Federal forces in mid-1864. The smaller town did not contain much to look at other than small businesses and the Mount Olivet Episcopal Church on Main Street. The large hog-processing building was vacant, an empty symbol of more prosperous times.

Though the works at the two forts were surrounded by massive walls, it wasn’t what the men hadn’t already seen at Port Hudson and Mobile. Something unique, however, was right there in the river in front of them. Being whisked away after only a day inside Mobile, the 76th did not have a chance to get a close look at the Confederate naval craft there. But moored in the river in front of the two forts was the infamous CSS Missouri. Tasked with guarding the ironclad that had struck fear in many Union naval commanders, the soldiers were able to get a closer look on a daily basis.

No major incidents with the civilian population in the area occurred on the 76th’s watch. The unit had more than 300 men present for duty and spent most of the time with repetitive drill, just like the Confederates in the vicinity had done when they were here earlier in the year.

In August the 76th would be sent to its final post: Greenwood, La., outside Shreveport. As their time there wound down, Olmsted Massy, now a sergeant, placed an advertisement in the Philadelphia-based Christian Recorder—attempting to locate his wife, Nancy, as he was ready to start a new life as a free man in New Orleans. “She was born and raised in Gochland County, Va.,” the advertisement read. “She was owned, about 15 years ago by John Mickey. Her name before marriage was Nancy Brown.”

The 76th officially disbanded on December 31, 1865. 

Edward Windsor writes from Corinth, Miss.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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The traces of the Underground Railroad hide in the open: a great church in Philadelphia; a humble old house backing up to the New Jersey Turnpike; an industrial outbuilding in Ohio. Over the course of four years, retired climate scientist and author David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad. On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad covers his odyssey. It’s a comprehensive and engaging look at the history of the places he stopped at along the way, but it’s also a personal journal, documenting the journey of self-discovery both physical and emotional that happens on a bike ride of a lifetime.

What inspired you to write a book about the Underground Railroad?

I am a climate scientist and have written two books about that. I also like to ride my bike. While riding through the small town of Vandalia, Ill., I stopped at a museum and a woman there handed me a heavy brass ring and asked, “Do you know what this is? It’s a slave collar.” She said Vandalia had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and that’s what got my curiosity going, the idea that I was crossing this invisible river where people on the run were coming up from the South. The book is based on a couple of rides over a few years. On the Eastern ride I followed Harriet Tubman’s route. She was enslaved in Cambridge, Md., and ultimately took her family to a little chapel in the town of St. Catharines, Ontario. That route took me through all kinds of familiar places that were not really very familiar to me—New York and Philadelphia. Almost like the undersides of cities, and where these formerly enslaved people were on the run.

The second part of the book is about riding from New Orleans, which was the predominant center of the slave trading market, to Lake Erie and a lot of the western routes of the Underground Railroad.

How was riding the route on a bike different than traveling it by car?

I thought that I could get closer to the experience of formerly enslaved people by being on a bike. A bike gives you the sense for the terrain. When I was riding along the Ohio River, I got the sense of how scary it could be for the formerly enslaved people, because the slave hunters were on both banks. But once you get up in the hills above the Ohio, there was shelter. There were Quaker towns, safe houses, and Underground Railroad houses. Being on a bike can give you some kind of a feeling of what these people were going through. Of course, I was also riding during the daytime, in safety, with Gore-Tex and nice gears and spokes. You also bump into people on the bike and conversations happen. There was once when I was coming up a real steep hill in Kentucky and I was watching a squall come across a field. A guy from a nearby house says to me, “Come on inside quick!” And he gave me a whole story about working in coal mines in Kentucky. Those kind of things happen.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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What was it like for you to tackle the history of somebody so mythologized as Harriet Tubman?

What’s interesting is that Harriet Tubman is very well-known now. She’s going to be on the $20 bill! But at the time, she was a wraith. Quite intentionally she made herself as close to invisible as she could. She’s a very tiny woman, but prodigiously strong. In one of her more famed escapes in Troy, N.Y., she disguises herself as the mother of the man she is trying to free. She gets into the marshall’s office and grabs him and yells to this mob outside, “Come on! Let’s get him!” And they manage to free him. At the time, the other conductors are amazed by her. She shows up in Philadelphia with another half dozen people that she’s brought up through Maryland and Delaware. She has all kinds of ingenious escapes along the way, including one in Wilmington, Del., where she smuggles freedom seekers out past slave hunters in a wagon of bricks. It was very easy to find her route in Maryland and Delaware, but after Philadelphia it took a lot of research. And she took many routes. We have all these digital footprints today, and you can’t go anywhere that somebody can’t track you. But even now people in places that are known Underground Railroad safehouses may say, “We think she was here, but we don’t know.” There’s this element even now that one of the most famous Americans is a ghost.

Did you have specific stories or sites you wanted to cover?

One of the references I found was a book in the Library of Congress by Charles Blockson, one of the eminent scholars of Black history. His book had a driving tour of Harriet Tubman sites. So, I thought, “Okay. This is where I need to go.” Then there were particular places along the way, especially in upstate New York, Albany, the Myers Residence. We know that Harriet Tubman stayed there. In Peterboro, N.Y., there’s the National Abolition Hall of Fame built around Gerrit Smith, a prominent sponsor of the Underground Railroad and of John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. It was fascinating to talk to the people who are keeping that history alive.

What was it like to tackle such a difficult subject matter as slavery?

You have to approach it with a certain amount of humility, especially from an old white guy looking at this subject. You have to be careful talking about the Underground Railroad. Best estimates are about 20,000 people traveled it to freedom, but when you compare it with the number of enslaved who were moved in the forced transport from the Upper South of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, the old tobacco plantations, to the cotton industry in the Deep South, there is a huge migration that takes place, on the order of a million people. There are places right around Washington, D.C., that are the center of this—for example in Alexandria, Va., the Franklin and Armfield firm, which some refer to as the Amazon of slave trading. People would be marched down the Shenandoah Valley, through Tennessee and onto the Natchez Trace and you can still see the signs of that.

One of the visuals we picked for the cover of the book is a photograph of the Old Trace from Nashville, Tenn., to Natchez, Miss., and it’s like a U-cut through the forest. There were thousands and thousands of chained feet that made that trek. I was riding the Natchez Trace Parkway, which is a beautiful road, and off to the side you see stretches of the Old Trace and you realize that those were people’s chained feet that formed that cut. So, the history bumps right up against you.

It’s not just a history book. It’s a travel journal. Tell us a little about the journey.

Well, I’ve done a lot of long-distance bike rides, and you get into a certain rhythm. People say it must be really hard, and because we have all our gear on the bike, it’s a pretty heavy load. I tell people, I have a job where I only have to work five hours a day. If I do 12 miles an hour and I ride for five hours, I have my 60 miles for the day. I would try to map out those days and end up someplace interesting.

A day’s ride is almost independent of the weather. Big electrical storms, yes, you need to get out of those. But otherwise, big winds, and heat, you have to ride through it. Some of the most interesting riding is in urban areas you know pretty well. Coming out of Philadelphia into New Jersey, there’s a huge suspension bridge. Bridges are windy and that was a lot different to ride on a bike than in a car. Also—the places you hear bad things about, you find out they’re not necessarily true. I had heard all kinds of bad things about Camden, N.J. It had a high murder rate, but it has changed a bit. It may not have fancy bike paths and such, but once again, we met people along the way, that wanted to help us on our way.

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A new graphic novel from the Association of the United States Army brings to life the story of a soldier who stood alone in the line of fire to protect other members of his unit.

Born in California, Edward Carter Jr. moved to India as a youth with his father, a missionary. Years before joining the U.S. military, Carter ran off to serve as a 15-year-old in a Chinese unit fighting against Japanese invaders. He later went on to fight alongside anti-fascist forces in Spain against Gen. Francisco Franco, according to Black History in America.

Carter would eventually enlist in the U.S. Army just before the outset of World War II, rising to the rank of staff sergeant before volunteering to serve with the 56th Armored Infantry Battalion, an all-Black unit deployed to Germany.

In March 1945, Carter’s unit was approaching the Rhine River when it was ordered to divert to Mannheim — towards the town of Speyer — to secure one of the remaining intact bridges. As the Americans advanced, heavy fire from Axis forces hindered progress. Reacting quickly, Carter opted to dismount from the now-crippled tank on which he and his men were riding and lead a small number of troops in a charge toward the Nazis.

“Staff Sergeant Carter and his squad took cover behind an intervening road bank,” his Medal of Honor citation reads. There, he “volunteered to lead a three-man patrol to the warehouse where other unit members noticed the original bazooka fire.”

Advancing under heavy machine gun fire, one soldier in Carter’s company was killed instantly. Carter then ordered the other two to seek cover. As the soldiers withdrew, one was shot and killed, the other wounded. Carter pressed on alone, however, despite being shot three times.

“He continued and received another wound in his left leg that knocked him from his feet,” his award citation continues. “As Staff Sergeant Carter took wound tablets and drank from his canteen, the enemy shot it from his left hand, with the bullet going through his hand.”

For two hours Carter took cover, hidden from sight directly next to the enemy’s fortification. Eight German soldiers eventually emerged to pursue the soldier with the intent of taking him prisoner. Carter then appeared from cover and killed six of them. The other two surrendered, according to the citation, and would later provide intel on enemy movements.

“Carter’s extraordinary heroism was an inspiration to the officers and men of the 7th Army, Infantry Company Number 1 (Provisional) and exemplify the highest traditions of the military service,” the citation concludes.

For his actions, Carter was originally awarded a Bronze Star, Distinguished Service Cross and a Purple Heart, according to Army records.

Upon returning stateside, Carter hoped to continue his military career, but was ruled to be ineligible because of his previous ties to the Chinese and Spanish conflicts.

Carted passed away in 1963. For decades, he was counted among the hundreds of Black service members excluded from Medal of Honor recognition. That was fixed in 1997.

“Finally, on Jan. 13, 1997, a wrong was addressed as seven black heroes joined those ranks,” Army records note. “Our state proudly associates with one of them, a California native, the late Army Staff Sgt. Edward Allen Carter Jr. His is a story of a true military man with more than his share of tribulations. Today, the California State Military Museum celebrates his victory over all challenges except that of being physically here to receive our thanks.”

Read the full Edward Carter Jr. graphic novel here.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

A young Paris Davis met a handful of soldiers while attending college in the deep South in the late 1950s.

Davis is Black, the soldiers were white.

Those soldiers had some words for him.

“A couple of NCOs thought I might be a fair soldier,” Davis told Army Times. “They said I ought to go into the military. The first thing they told me ‘do what the sergeants tell you, they’re not going to lead you wrong.’ And I did and they did and that’s why we’re in this room.”

Davis shared that memory as he spent the day being interviewed by multiple media outlets Thursday, a short time before he would stand in his old uniform, festooned with ribbons, badges and medals, but with space for one more – the Medal of Honor.

On Friday, President Joe Biden looked at retired Army Col. Paris Davis and then to the crowd and said that this day may be the “most consequential” of any day during his presidency.

“Paris, you are everything this medal means,” Biden said. “And you are everything our generation aspired to be and you’re everything our nation is at our best.”

The nation may have waited nearly six decades to right the wrong of not bestowing this medal on Davis, but the octogenarian released those prospects before weapons had cooled from the harrowing battle he’d survived.

Spc. Ronald Deis didn’t even know what Green Berets were in 1963 when he attended advanced infantry training while waiting on an officer candidate position. He joined the Army to fly helicopters.

But he and five other soldiers in the same status listened to a gruff first sergeant as he clicked through slides showing the work that the newly-formed Special Forces were doing.

“And when he showed a slide of a Green Beret in a jungle eating a snake I said, ‘sign me up,’” he said.

Deis didn’t look back, ripping through the training and landing in Okinawa, Japan for his first unit assignment.

The first sergeant told him and the other newbies they were forming a team that was headed to Vietnam.

“And naturally, I said yes,” Deis said.

That’s when he met Davis.

“I like to tell people that he did not lead as an authoritarian,” Deis said. “The men on the team I think respected him from the very start.”

On June 17, 1965, in the vicinity of Bong Son, Republic of Vietnam, Davis, three other Green Berets and an inexperienced company of the 883rd South Vietnamese Regional Force in an attack on an enemy base.

That night, Davis captured two enemy personnel himself and questioned them. He learned that a “vastly larger enemy force” patrolled the area. The captain put his men into position and commenced the attack.

Enemy fire wounded Davis on the initial attack, but he fought through, and killed several enemy soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, according to the award citation.

Despite a counterattack that separated Davis from his troops, he led the four soldiers he had with him as they braved intense fire, destroyed gun emplacements and captured more enemy soldiers.

Deis’ job during the mission required him to fly in a small spotter plane and monitor the unfolding operation and coordinate communications, fire and air support.

Within a half hour in the air, enemy fire shot down Deis’ plane. He made it to headquarters and started receiving wounded from the fight and hearing spurts of radio traffic on what his captain and teammates faced out there.

“I knew my teammates were all wounded and I knew that [Capt.] Davis was trying desperately to get his people back to an evacuation site where they could get them off the battlefield.”

After the chaos of battle separated Davis from his men, he regrouped his forces, broke contact with the enemy and called for air and artillery fire as the enemy again counterattacked. A close-range shot from another enemy soldier wounded Davis for the second time.

He tackled the man, defeating him in hand-to-hand combat before he saw two American soldiers wounded and pinned under ongoing small arms fire.

Asked, all these decades later, what stood out most from those two trying days, Davis shared with Army Times a snippet of those memories.

He crawled out 150 yards to one of his soldiers who’d been shot in the temple but still lived.

“Seeing him going in and out of reality, at one point he grabs my hand and says, ‘am I gonna die?’ and I say, holding his hand, ‘not before me,’” Davis said.

The captain timed moving the wounded off the battlefield with smoke, close air and artillery fire.

Not everyone made it. But Davis knew the bodies had to come home.

Without disclosing too many details, he said he had some “choice” words with an individual on one of the evacuation aircraft about leaving without the dead.

“I refused to leave and he thought I should,” Davis said. He thinks that had some initial impact on his Medal of Honor recommendation package being “lost” more than once. Others believe race was a factor, Davis served as a pioneering Black officer, the first to lead Special Forces troops in combat.

“At that time I thought something happened and I might not get the medal,” Davis said. “And I just completely forgot about it, I really did.”

Deis remembers a sergeant, a kind of mentor of his, arriving back at the headquarters, having spent the past two days in battle with Davis. This sergeant had seen much combat, more than any other in the group.

“I was helping get leeches off of his body from him lying in a rice paddy all day and he mentioned that he thought that Capt. Davis deserved the Medal of Honor for what he observed that day,” Deis said. “I never forgot that. That was pretty profound.”

After the Fight

Davis did later receive the Silver Star Medal. But as the decades dragged on, that didn’t sit right with Deis and others, who, starting in 2016 began a campaign of their own to have the medal recommendation reconsidered by the Army.

“It matters to me because I know what it takes to be nominated for the Medal of Honor,” Deis said. “To not have that recognized is an injustice.”

Maj. Gen. Patrick Roberson, deputy commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, knows a few things about valor after his own decades-long career in Special Forces.

Roberson told Army Times that the timeframe in which Davis and his team served as one of the golden ages of special operations as the newly formed Green Berets tested their mettle and fought in an entirely different kind of war than their predecessors.

Some of what was established by those Vietnam-era teams continued to be common practice a generation later in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Small teams working with indigenous forces in the midst of enemy territory can sound pretty familiar to a Green Beret of any age.

A number of the Vietnam War veterans in the special operations community come to speak at training events and lectures still, he said.

“When we look back on what they were doing, they did it masterfully,” he said.

Roberson said Davis’ actions and his career provide inspiration for him and the entire Army.

Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Weimer, the top enlisted individual for U.S. Special Operations Command and the incoming Sergeant Major of the Army, said that since childhood he has been a student of the Green Berets of Vietnam.

“I was not surprised,” Weimer said. “When the story came out I was not really surprised because of the amount of heroism that took place on a regular basis back then with little fanfare.”

The senior NCO said that Davis’ service in Vietnam and his career are living the motto of the Special Forces – “De Oppresso Liber” or “to free the oppressed.”

“I am a Green Beret today because of Green Berets like Col. Davis.”

Another life

Davis stayed in the Army after Vietnam, making colonel in 1981 and assuming command of the 10th Special Forces Group at Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

Which was his favorite command, he told Army Times.

“I was so happy,” he said. “It was like being in a place and loving every bit of it.”

Davis retired as a colonel in 1985. The proud father of three children published the Metro Herald newspaper for 30 years in Alexandria, Virginia following his Army career.

If his medal has a purpose, he said he hopes it serves to honor what all of the men of his team did during their time in Vietnam. Many, he said, didn’t receive the valor awards that they deserved.

Hero. Bravery. Courage. These are words that are hard to accept for anyone. Davis is no different.

“Was I scared?” Davis said. “Yeah.”

“Am I a real brave man?” he said. “No. Every person on that team could have been me.”

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

Since the inception in 1907, first as the U.S. Army Signal Corps then designated as the U.S. Army Air Forces, aviation as a whole had been strictly limited to white personnel. It was not until 1943 — a full year after the U.S. entry into World War II — when the first contingent of Black aviators trained at Tuskegee, Alabama.

These men went on to form the 99th Fighter Squadron and shipped out to North Africa. That unit and the 332nd Fighter Group that followed would prove their worth in the last two years of World War II.

Among those men was Oscar Lawton “Wilk” Wilkerson.

According to the Chicago Sun Times, Wilkerson, the last known surviving member of the Tuskegee Airmen in the Chicago area, died on Feb. 8 of natural causes. He was 96.

“A friend of mine and I were in high school and we were both interested in aviation, so we found out that there was availability to receive training in the [Army] Air Forces. We went to take the test, passed and were accepted into the [Army] Air Forces while we were in high school,” Wilkerson later said in a ceremony honoring Tuskegee Airmen. “Ten days after [high school] graduation we were on our way to Biloxi, [Mississippi] to join the [Army Air Forces]. When we got to Biloxi, we took the aptitude test and I went to pilot training…”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Wilkerson earned his Wings in 1946 as a B-25 pilot and was assigned to the 617th Bombardment Squadron, 477th Bombardment Group.

Wilkerson was quick to note that although he was a Tuskegee Airman, he was not a combat pilot and that he was “riding their shoulders.”

“While I was in training, my motivation was to get these wings and I wear them today proudly,” said Wilkerson.

With the end of the Second World War and the rapid drawdown of troops, Wilkerson, as a Black man in America, saw his opportunities dwindle.

Despite his qualifications, Black aviators like Wilkerson weren’t allowed to fly commercially.

“After the war, we were not able to go into commercial aviation, Blacks weren’t accepted at that time,” said Wilkerson. “I couldn’t fly commercially, so I became a bus driver in Chicago. Later I got a job in radio and retired in 1988.”

In 2007, Wilkerson was among about 300 surviving Tuskegee Airmen awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President George W. Bush. Despite such accolades, the pilot remained humble.

“He could have walked on water,” his friend Maceo Ellison told the Chicago Sun Times in regards to the reverence the Black community held for the Tuskegee Airmen. “There weren’t too many Black heroes back then besides the boxer Joe Louis.”

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Grace King didn’t realize until a few years ago that her cousin, George J. Johnson, was a Marine veteran. And she didn’t realize until January that he was part of the Montford Point Marines, the first Black men allowed to enlist in the Marine Corps.

Her mother and Johnson were cousins, technically making him her first cousin once removed. But they were close. He and his wife, Hannah, often would come down from New York to stay with her family in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the summer.

It was strange to her that Johnson, now 101, hadn’t talked about being a Marine until recent years.

“George isn’t a very modest person,” King told Marine Corps Times. “He has that New York swagger.”

In January, King saw a local ABC segment on the Montford Point Marines. That led her to connect with Mallorie Berger, whose grandfather was a Montford Point Marine and who has joined efforts to track down these Marines and their families.

On Feb. 6, Johnson was honored with a bronze replica of the Congressional Gold Medal honoring the first Black U.S. Marines, many of whom served in World War II.

The daughter of former Cpl. Moses Williams, another Montford Point Marine, also received a medal in her father’s honor.

Pamela Y. Williams had long known that Moses Williams was a member of military police in the Marine Corps. But her father, a soft-spoken man, didn’t talk about his experiences in the military. She had heard about Montford Point from a friend whose father also had served there, several decades after he died in 1970 at the age of 44.

Receiving the medal on her father’s behalf left her feeling “overwhelmed and just very, very proud.”

“I can only imagine what types of hardships they had to go through,” Pamela Y. Williams said. “But I know that they had no idea that they were making history — which is exactly what they did.”

Johnson, the other Montford Pointer honored on Feb. 6, now has failing health, according to King. It’s hard to get details from him on his time as a member of military police — though he does sometimes mention transporting prisoners to Alcatraz — and he wasn’t up for an interview with Marine Corps Times.

“When you mention Montford Point, he does light up,” King said.

Leaders of the National Montford Point Marine Association and local politicians attended the ceremony honoring Johnson and Williams, as did the junior ROTC class from Dillard High, Johnson’s alma mater, according to Berger.

“It’s almost like (Johnson) was a star because everybody wanted to take a picture with him,” King said.

Johnson found the ceremony, held at the African American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, “very moving,” according to King.

“It’s hard to believe. It’s very incredible,” Johnson told a local ABC affiliate. “Those that gave it to me and those who made it possible for me to have it.”

King told Marine Corps Times that the presence of two other living Montford Pointers — former Cpl. George McIvory and former Sgt. Allen Williams — and of retired Army Maj. Gen. James W. Monroe, who knows both Johnson’s and Williams’ families, made the ceremony even more special for her cousin.

A trailblazing group of Marines

During the American Revolution, at least 13 of the 2,000 men in the Continental Marines, the forerunner to the Marine Corps, were Black, according to the National Museum of the Marine Corps. But beginning in the last decade of the 18th century, Black men were barred from serving in the Corps.

In June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order opening all of the military services to Black men. The response from then-Commandant Maj. Gen. Thomas Holcomb was, “If it were a question of having a Marine Corps of 5,000 whites or 250,000 Negroes, I would rather the whites.”

In 1942, following Roosevelt’s order, the Marine Corps established a segregated post for Black Marines at Montford Point near Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The men had to build the camp from the ground up, and they endured particularly harsh treatment.

By the time Montford Point closed in 1949 amid the desegregation of the military, approximately 20,000 men had served there. Around 2,000 of them saw combat in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, Japan, alone.

In 2011, President Barack Obama signed a law authorizing a Congressional Gold Medal to be awarded collectively to all the Montford Point Marines.

“Despite being denied many basic rights, the Montford Point Marines committed to serve our country with selfless patriotism,” Obama stated at the time.

To date, the National Montford Point Marine Association has awarded approximately 3,000 medal replicas to Montford Pointers or their families, according to Joe Geeter, a spokesman for the association.

But that’s only a fraction of the Marines who served at Montford Point.

Part of the challenge is that there isn’t a personnel log for these Marines. Only approximately 400 are still alive, according to Geeter. And, Berger said, it’s common for Montford Point Marines not to tell their families about their service in the Corps.

“There was a lot of abuse that happened to them,” she said. “So how do you come home and share those stories with your family that were abused, outside of the rigors of boot camp?”

Berger said she believes many of the Montford Point Marines developed what would now be called post-traumatic stress from their service.

For her part, she didn’t know that her grandfather, former Pvt. Maurice L. Burns Sr., was part of the Montford Point Marines until 2021 — long after his death in 1996. She happened upon an article about Montford Point online, and that prompted her to look through a box of papers she had found when she cleared out her grandmother’s house years ago.

There was her grandfather’s discharge paperwork, along with a letter he had written to his former assistant drill instructor asking for his help in getting the Veterans Administration to compensate him for his serious service-related back pain.

Berger has since worked to raise awareness about Montford Point and to find those who served there and their families.

“Unwittingly and unknowingly, they were civil right activists,” Berger said.

If you believe you or a loved one deserves recognition for serving as a Montford Point Marine, contact the National Montford Point Marine Association by emailing Info@montfordpointmarines.org or one of the regional contacts listed on its website. Include your full name, mailing address and phone number; if you are reaching out on behalf of a Montford Pointer, also include his full name.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

Over the course of four years, David Goodrich rode his bicycle 3,000 miles east of the Mississippi to travel the routes of the Underground Railroad. His new book, On Freedom Road: Bicycle Explorations and Reckonings on the Underground Railroad, covers his journey. American History magazine’s Director of Photography Melissa A. Winn talked with him about the book, the bike ride, and the stories he collected along the way.  

From 1854 to 1860, America’s newspaper headlines screamed bloody murder. Sensationalist headlines read: “Bleeding Kansas!” “Sack of Lawrence!” “Pottawatomie Massacre!” “Battle of Osawatomie!” “Marais De Cygnes Massacre!” “Much Blood Spilt!” “Murder and Cold-Blooded Assassination!” Purportedly they were relaying news of an incredibly bloody and deadly clash of anti- and pro-slavery forces fought along the Kansas-Missouri border. 

No single event in the nation’s drift toward Southern secession and the armed conflict that would inevitably follow paved the road to war more than the hyped-up strife that took place for six years from 1854-1860 in eastern Kansas and western Missouri along the border between the state and the new territory.

A Media Myth?

Dramatic headlines would deepen the nation’s rapidly developing North-South rift, dividing those who fervently opposed further extension of what they realized was the country’s “original sin”—the curse of slavery—and those who stubbornly supported maintaining African Americans in chattel bondage as both constitutionally legal and essential to clinging to their wealth, livelihood and way of life. No rational person today can argue against the fact that slavery was an evil that had to be eradicated from the United States, nor can anyone deny that pro-slavery forces were fighting on the wrong side of history. The duty of historians is to investigate, determine the historical facts and accurately report those facts—in particular, historians must not perpetuate myths. 

The overblown headlines, created and promoted by partisan newspaper reporting on both sides, misrepresented what was actually happening west of the Mississippi River along Kansas territory’s eastern border. Newspapers championing both sides of the deeply-entwined “slavery-states’ rights” issue filled their papers with fabricated “atrocities” and overly-sanguine accounts of “pitched battles” in which casualties were actually either miniscule in number or often completely nonexistent.

This apparently horrific partisan struggle pushed the nation into its bloodiest war more than any pre-Civil War conflict, but was simply a fabrication created by the burgeoning national newspaper industry and capitalized upon by the ambitious new Republican political party to help it rally a nationwide electorate to win the White House in the 1860 U.S. presidential election.

The historical irony of so-called “Bleeding Kansas” is that over 10 times more Americans were murdered in the streets of San Francisco, California, in one year—1855—than were ever killed for their political beliefs during the 1854-1860 Border War. Simply put, “Bleeding Kansas” is an easily-disprovable albeit long-enduring myth. 

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act was a patched-together compromise hammered out by Illinois Democrat Senator Stephen A. Douglas and then-President Franklin Pierce, a “northern Democrat” opposed to Abolitionism but willing to compromise to dampen northern and southern firebrands. The act ostensibly promoted construction of a transcontinental railroad and the accompanying economic benefit of opening millions of acres of land to new settlement.

However, it included the “popular sovereignty” concept (introduced in the 1850 Compromise but as yet untested), permitting Kansas and Nebraska territory settlers to decide by popular vote whether they would enter the Union as “free” or “slave” states. Well-meaning—but not well-considered—“popular sovereignty” essentially made obsolete previous Congressional attempts (1820 Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) to alleviate rising North-South sectional tensions regarding slavery’s spread. 

In hindsight, the 1854 act inevitably created the political conditions in Kansas territory that, predictably, devolved into violence as pro- and anti-slavery factions clashed to influence the “popular sovereignty” vote’s outcome regarding statehood. Although initially assumed that Nebraska would become a “free state” and Kansas would enter as a “slave” state, once the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed all bets were off. “Popular sovereignty” made Kansas territory a free-for-all for anti- and pro-slavery factions. Henceforth, whichever side of the slavery question wanted to prevail in Kansas would have to fight for it.

Inevitably, violence erupted along the Kansas-Missouri border in 1854, and nationwide newspapers consciously and deliberately propelled what were in fact relatively minor border clashes into a major, national political issue. The term “Bleeding Kansas” itself originally appeared in 1856 in abolitionist editor Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to falsely describe the struggle as being one of “innocent” Free-state settlers unjustly harassed by evil pro-slavery Missouri “Bushwhackers,” thereby deliberately stoking the fires of North-South sectional passions.

Newspapers Weigh In

Yet, the truth is that despite the amplified claims of partisan newspaper editors, neither side in the Border War held a monopoly on ruthlessness and violence in pursuit of their opposing political causes.  

Between 1840 and 1860, printed newspapers—daily, weekly, quarterly and periodically—underwent an explosion of overall numbers and the amount of copies printed annually. While the U.S. population then rose 180%, newspaper numbers increased 250% with total annual printed copies expanding nearly 500%. 

Propelling this phenomenon were ground-breaking (labor-saving and cost-cutting) advances in printing technology. Truly “industrial scale” printing resulted from the Fourdrinier paper-making machine (U.S. introduction in 1827), which created continuous rolled paper in massive quantities and the steam-powered, continuous-feed, rotary printing press (invented in 1843 by American Richard M. Hoe).

No longer limited by laboriously printing single sheets, countless copies of a page could be produced daily. By the 1850s, illustrations were prominently featured, enhancing visual appeal, while increased staffing (typically, 1-2 in the 1820-30s; 30 in the 1840s; and 100 by the 1850s in larger papers) made it possible to fill more pages with more stories of national, regional and local interest. Advances in railroad transportation sped distribution. Improved communications (telegraph) meant widespread “breaking news.” The resulting “media blitz” was a newspaper revolution.

That era’s most influential newspaperman, New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley (editor from 1841-72), explained in 1851 how the phenomenon’s nationwide spread mirrored the country’s growth: “[T]he general rule…was for each town to have a newspaper, and, in the free states, each county of 20,000 or more usually had two papers—one for each [political] party. A county of 50,000 usually had five journals…and when a town reached 15,000 inhabitants…it usually had a daily paper and at 20,000 it had two.” 

Citizens today would expect media sources to strive diligently to present the news as straightforward facts and allow the public to draw its own conclusions. However, in the mid-19th century, political partisanship in newspapers was the norm, not the exception. The “Bleeding Kansas” myth resulted from unashamedly biased newspaper reporting—each paper aggressively politically partisan and firmly committed to championing its favored side in that conflict. Editors blatantly chose sides, some aligning with the new, anti-slavery Republican Party, while others backed the then pro-slavery Democratic Party. Partisan editors graphically described the “Border War” as a war of annihilation waged by pro- and anti-slavery factions to determine Kansas territory’s future statehood status as a “free” or “slave” state. 

Exaggerated Casualties

Readers nationwide became morbidly mesmerized by the “terrible casualties” reported and impatiently stood by to purchase “hot off the press” papers recounting the latest atrocities. Right was irrevocably on the side the competing newspaper editors supported, while the opposing side was accused of incredible acts of violence. 

These attention-getting headlines sent circulation soaring. The atrocities described were either exaggerated or fabricated to stoke the flames of political hatred and animosity. This “spin,” in contemporary parlance, favored a particular cause or political party. A century-and-a-half ago, political parties and their media allies ignored the truth and outrageously manipulated facts.

Editors profited by exaggerating the trans-Mississippi border conflict. Both sides developed derogatory names for each other; anti-slavery newspapers condemned pro-slavery forces—primarily from Missouri—as “Border Ruffians,” “Bushwhackers” and “Pukes,” while the Kansas partisans were known as “Redlegs” and “Jayhawkers.” 

Created in 1854, the new Republican Party—formed of former Whigs, Free Staters and anti-slavery activists—finished a surprising second in 1856 with its first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont. In the 1860 presidential election, the party made maximum advantage of the headline-gathering Border War to expand its mainly regional electorate into a party with widespread national appeal. The new political party was eager to capitalize on the Border War to create a national voter base to promote the party’s 1860 presidential ambitions. 

When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed in 1854, 15 states (and three territories west of the Mississippi) still permitted slavery, while the abominable practice was illegal in 17 states and five territories.

With the handwriting on the wall regarding slavery’s ultimate survival, Southern states’ slave power block was desperate that Kansas become a slave state. Correspondingly, Northern anti-slavery forces, led by committed Abolitionists and anti-slavery activists, were equally determined that Kansas become free.

A Rush On Kansas

Frantically, residents of Kansas territory’s neighboring slave state, Missouri, fearful that a “free state” Kansas on its western border, combined with the established free states of Illinois on its eastern border and Iowa on its northern border, would surround the border slave state on three sides—becoming a runaway slave magnet—rushed “settlers” across Missouri’s western border into contiguous eastern Kansas to “vote-pack” Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Although the statewide population of Missouri was then split between pro- and anti-slavery adherents, the pro-slavery faction firmly held state power in Missouri’s capital, Jefferson City.

Adamantly opposed to slavery, the Boston-based Abolitionist, New England Emigrant Aid Company—generously financed by wealthy northeastern businessmen such as Eli Thayer, Alexander H. Bullock and Edward Everett Hale—quickly organized an anti-slavery settler movement. The Emigrant Aid Company funded the settlement of eastern Kansas, rapidly packing it with heavily recruited, anti-slavery settlers, and well-armed them with numerous Sharps .52-cal breech-loading rifles.

Both sides therefore—not just pro-slavery Missourians as is often claimed today—raced to populate Kansas territory with their ideological followers. Both sides unconscionably “packed” Kansas with adherents who obediently “stuffed” ballot boxes with votes to control the election. Anti- and pro-slavery adherents were equally guilty of vote tampering, voter intimidation, ballot-box stuffing and election malfeasance. 

The stage was thus set for a bitter fight for Kansas’ statehood status: two well-armed opposing factions holding unwavering political positions faced off in what, according to the era’s terminology, was dubbed a “War to the Knife, and the Knife to the Hilt!” Yet the truth of the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War is much different than what we accept today as “conventional wisdom.” 

How Bloody was the Struggle?

Conventional wisdom only holds up until someone actually does the math. That someone is historian Dale Watts in his ground-breaking article “How Bloody Was Bleeding Kansas?” published in the Summer 1995 editionof Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains. Watts’ exhaustively-researched article discovered “Bleeding Kansas” produced only a small fraction of the politically-motivated deaths of anti- and pro-slavery forces both sides widely claimed. 

Using historical documents and meticulously examining 1854-1860 death records, Watts determined which deaths were “political killings” (i.e., murders by a pro- or anti-slavery partisan because of the victim’s opposing political stance) or due to apolitical motivations (e.g., land disputes, personal animosity, or common criminality, robbery or homicides). Contemporary accounts nearly always overestimated the conflict’s deaths.

For example, the Hoogland Claims Commission 1859 report outlandishly claimed “the number of lives sacrificed in Kansas during [1854-1855] probably exceeded rather than fell short of two hundred.” However, Watts’s research verified the casualty record generally confirmed by Robert W. Richmond’s 1974 conclusion that “approximately fifty persons died violently [for political reasons] during [Kansas’] territorial period [1854-1860].” 

Watts’s independent research revealed that of 157 documented violent deaths from 1854-1860 in Kansas territory, only 56 were attributed to the Kansas-Missouri political struggle. For historical comparison, Watts noted that in the contemporary “gold rush-era” California alone, a total of 583 people died violently in 1855, and at least 1,200 people were murdered in San Francisco between 1850 and 1853. This violent death comparison makes Kansas Territory seem almost calm given its small number of political killings recorded during the much-hyped Border War.

Single-digit Casualties 

Significantly, Watts shows that of those 56 murders, 30 were “pro-slavery” advocates, including the only woman slain, Sarah Carver, whose husband merely professed to be pro-slavery while there were 24 anti-slavery proponents killed. One victim was an ostensibly neutral U.S. Army soldier while one was an officer whom both sides tried to claim. Moreover, some allegedly “bloody battles” (called “wars” and “massacres” at the time) were essentially bloodless or resulted in single-digit casualties. For example, in the June 1856 “Battle” of Black Jack not one person was killed. 

No “Bleeding Kansas” engagement produced more than five deaths. Anti-slavery radical John Brown and his sons killed five allegedly pro-slavery settlers during his notorious “Pottawatomie Massacre” from May 24-25, 1856 along Pottawatomie Creek. The attackers used broadswords to hack their neighbors to death in retaliation for the nearly bloodless “sack” of Lawrence three days prior. 

Even the inaptly-named May 21, 1856 “Sack of Lawrence” produced only two casualties—one on each side. This incident is not to be confused with the later Lawrence Massacre during the Civil War in August 1863 by Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill’s raid that killed over 160, mostly civilians. The 1856 incident essentially consisted of Douglas County Sheriff Samuel J. Jones leading a force of about 800 citizens to Lawrence to enforce a legal warrant, and the damage to property consisted of the razing of the Free State Hotel (then used as headquarters of Kansas’ anti-slavery forces) along with the residence of anti-slavery firebrand, Massachusetts-born Charles L. Robinson who was elected Kansas’ first state governor in 1861 and in 1862 became the first U.S. state governor—and only Kansas governor—to be impeached. A single pro-slavery man was killed by being crushed in a collapsing building and a single anti-slavery man suffered a non-fatal injury. 

Watts’s research proves conclusively that “Bleeding Kansas” was a myth that grew from fabrications in biased newspapers and fueled by political parties seeking to promote partisan interests. Nearly a million Americans would die making war on each other in the subsequent Civil War, which was in large part precipitated by the 1854-1860 “Bleeding Kansas” Border War.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Riding the bus from his Harlem boardinghouse to his new job in downtown Manhattan on a frigid February day in 1918, Walter White skimmed the morning papers until he came to a headline that read “Negro Burned at Stake.” The accompanying article was short but horrific:

“Estill Springs, Tenn. Feb 12—Jim McIlherron, a negro who shot and killed two white men here last Friday, was burned at the stake here tonight after a confession had been forced from him by application of red hot irons…The prisoner was taken out of town, chained to a tree, tortured until he confessed, implicating another negro, and then was burned.”

White showed the article around the office. Two weeks earlier, he’d taken a job as assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a nine-year-old civil rights organization. What, White asked his bosses, would the NAACP do about this grisly murder?

The group’s usual response to lynchings—dozens occurred every year—was to send a telegram of protest to state officials, followed by an angry press release. White, 24, had another idea. He volunteered to travel to the scene of the crime in rural Tennessee to uncover the full story so the NAACP could reveal all the grisly details to the American public. 

His bosses thought that was crazy. A Black man arriving in a small southern town to investigate a lynching was liable to get lynched himself.

But White persisted, arguing that he was perfect for the task. Although he was Black and had attended segregated Black schools from first grade through college in his native Atlanta, he had light skin, blue eyes, and straight brown hair, legacies of many Caucasian ancestors. He could easily pass for White, White argued, and on a previous job selling insurance he’d traveled around Georgia, so he knew how to get along with rural southerners, Black and White.

A born salesman, White sold his bosses on his idea. Two days later, he boarded a train for Tennessee. The man who had signed up for a comfortable desk job in the NAACP’s Fifth Avenue headquarters spent much of the next decade as an undercover detective, traveling the United States of America to investigate and chronicle more than 40 lynchings and race riots.

White stepped off a train in Estill Springs, where Jim McIlherron had been killed, and rented a room in a White boardinghouse, telling the desk clerk he was a salesman for the Excelsior Medicine Company. He wandered to the general store where, he guessed, folks would be huddled around a potbelly stove, trading gossip. He was right, so he introduced himself, remarked on the weather, and sat down to chat.

Mentioning the Jim McIlherron matter would have aroused suspicion. When his new companions brought up the lynching, White pretended he’d never heard of it, then changed the subject. His feigned indifference only increased their eagerness to talk about the most exciting event they’d ever seen, and they soon were recounting the story in horrifying detail.

“By waiting for them to bring up the subject, which I knew would be inevitable, and by cautious questioning, I got all the information I needed,” White explained that evening in a letter he sent to his NAACP bosses. “Will tell story in detail when I return to office.”

White told the story in a shocking article for The Crisis, a 100,000-circulation NAACP monthly that famed Black scholar W. E. B. DuBois edited. Jim McIlherron had not been popular with Whites around Estill Springs, White wrote. A prosperous Black farmer who had lived awhile in Detroit, Michigan, McIlherron was disinclined to defer to Whites. On February 8, 1918, he came to town and bought 15 cents worth of candy. As he was strolling down the street eating it, three young White men began pelting him with rocks. “Rocking” Blacks was a common amusement among Whites in Estill Springs, but McIlherron was not amused. He pulled a pistol and fired, killing two of the rock throwers.

McIlherron returned to his home, which he then fled on a mule, stopping at his minister’s house. A mob that had been chasing him shot the minister dead. McIlherron escaped, but not for long. Two days later, a posse captured him and brought him to Estill Springs, where more than 1,000 Whites had gathered.

“McIlherron was chained to a hickory tree,” White wrote. “Wood and other inflammable material was saturated with coal oil and piled around his feet. The fire was not lighted at once, as the crowd was determined ‘to have some fun with the damned nigger’ before he died.”

White men heated iron bars in a fire until the ends glowed red, then pressed them against McIlherron’s neck and thighs. After 20 minutes of this torture, somebody used a red-hot iron bar to castrate McIlherron. He begged his tormenters to shoot him, but they refused, saying, “We ain’t half done with you yet, nigger.’

“By this time, however, some of the members of the mob had, apparently, become sickened at the sight and urged that the job be finished,” White wrote. “Finally, one man poured coal oil on the Negro’s trousers and shoes and lighted the fire around McIlherron’s feet. The flames rose rapidly, soon enveloping him, and in a few minutes McIlherron was dead.”

Not long after White’s gruesome story appeared in the May 1918 issue of The Crisis, its author headed to Georgia to investigate a series of lynchings even more horrible. Again posing as a salesman, White learned that the violence had arisen from Georgia’s infamous “convict leasing” system. Poor Blacks who had been convicted of minor crimes got a choice: pay a fine or go to jail. White landowners needing laborers would pay the fine if the convict agreed to work off the debt, a process that could take years. When Sidney Johnson, who was Black, was arrested for gambling and fined $30, Hampton Smith, owner of a plantation near Valdosta, paid Johnson’s fine and worked him for months. When Johnson insisted he’d paid his debt, Smith beat him up. Two days later, Johnson shot Smith dead.

Planters who paid the fines of convicted Blacks could keep them in a harsh form of indentured servitude for as long as they liked.

When news of the killing spread, a mob searched for Johnson without success. Frustrated, the revenge seekers hunted other Blacks known to have quarreled with Smith over working conditions. On Friday, May 17, a mob lynched two Black men, then fired hundreds of bullets into their corpses. That Saturday, mobs lynched three Black men and left their bodies hanging from trees. On Sunday, Mary Turner—eight months pregnant and widow of a mob victim—demanded that police arrest her husband’s killers. Irate, a mob hung Turner upside down, soaked her clothing in gasoline, and set it afire. As she was writhing in agony, a man sliced the fetus from her womb with a carving knife and crushed it beneath his shoe.

“I shall never forget the morning when I stood where Mary Turner was killed,” White wrote in a letter, “her grave marked by an empty quart whisky bottle with the stump of a cigar stuck in its mouth.”

White spent three days in the area, first listening to White folks’ accounts of the lynchings then circulating among Blacks, identifying himself as an NAACP worker and hearing their stories. Later, he posed as a reporter for the New York Post—Post publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, a member of the NAACP board, had given him credentials—and interviewed Georgia’s governor, Hugh Dorsey, who denounced mob violence. But no one was ever arrested for the murders.

The NAACP publicized White’s findings and newspapers published angry editorials. The outcry convinced President Woodrow Wilson, no friend of Blacks or of civil rights, that lynchings were undermining his efforts to portray America’s war with Germany as a moral crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.”

“Every mob contributes to German lies about the United States,” Wilson wrote in an anti-lynching proclamation in July 1918. “Every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this democracy, but its betrayer.”

Wilson’s words were welcome; a presidential proclamation, however, had no legal power. Determined to pass and enact a federal anti-lynching law, John Shillady, head of the NAACP, dispatched White to Washington to lobby for a bill to make lynching a federal felony. Despite the NAACP’s efforts, the proposal languished for years. In 1922, the House of Representatives passed an anti-lynching measure. Southern senators killed the proposed legislation with a filibuster. Filibusters dispatched anti-lynching bills in 1935, 1938, 1948, and 1949.

In 1919, the attorney general of Texas announced that the NAACP could not operate in his state because the organization was not chartered in Texas and because its opposition to segregation violated Texas law. When John Shillady, the NAACP’s White executive secretary, traveled to Austin to meet the attorney general, eight men, including a local judge and two policemen, brutally beat him in broad daylight and put him on a northbound train. Texas Governor William Hobby defended the assault, calling Shillady a “narrow-brained, double-chinned reformer” guilty of “stirring up racial discontent.” Shillady never recovered. After several hospitalizations and brief attempts to return to work, he resigned. He died a year later.

White watched his boss’s deterioration with horror. He knew he might meet a similar fate any time he investigated a lynching. But he persisted, traveling thousands of miles year by year to uncover and tell the stories behind racist mob terrorism.

“With his keen investigative skills and light complexion,” White’s biographer, Kenneth Robert Janken, wrote, “Walter White had proven to be the NAACP’s secret weapon against white violence.”

In 1919, White traveled to Shubata, Mississippi, to investigate the killing of four Black farmworkers, two of them young women. “The white people would not talk very much about the matter,” White wrote in a letter to headquarters, but a Black preacher and a cousin of the female victims told him the sordid backstory.

All four victims worked on a farm owned by a White dentist who had impregnated both women, sisters Maggie and Alma Howze. One of the male victims, Major Clark, had begun dating Maggie Howze.

That angered the dentist, who ordered Clark to end the relationship. When the dentist was murdered, police arrested the Howzes, Clark, and his 15-year-old brother, Andrew. At a police station, cops stripped Clark, put his testicles in a vise and squeezed them until he confessed. A trial was scheduled, but never occurred because a mob dragged all four suspects out of jail and hanged them from a bridge over the Chickasawhay River.

“It will do great good,” White wrote to his bosses, “to let the world know that such a thing can and does happen in America.”

In 1920, White traveled to Ocoee, Florida, a citrus-farming town near Orlando. A few days before, on Election Day, a White mob, angered that a black man had attempted to vote in the presidential election, had put a Black neighborhood in Ocoee to the torch.

“I was regarded with very great suspicion,” White wrote in his report, “until I let it be known that I might be in the market for an orange grove.” Seeing dollar signs, White residents showed him farm properties and talked about the riot. Weeks before Election Day, the local Ku Klux Klan had proclaimed that no Black people would be allowed to vote. When Moses Norman, a prosperous Black citrus farmer, went to the polls, a White mob attacked him.

Norman fled to the home of a friend, Julius Perry. The mob  surrounded Perry’s house and set it aflame. Then the rioters burned the rest of the neighborhood, incinerating 20 houses, two churches, and a school, shooting Black residents as they were fleeing the flames. “The number killed will never be known,” White wrote in The New Republic. “I asked a white citizen of Ocoee, who boasted of his participation in the slaughter, how many Negroes died. He declared that 56 people were known to have been killed—and he said he’d killed 17 ‘niggers’ himself.”

That man was almost certainly exaggerating. But even now, nobody knows how many people died in the riot because nearly every surviving Black resident, possibly including Moses Norman, quickly fled Ocoee. “At the time I visited Ocoee, the last colored family of Ocoee was leaving with their goods piled high on a motor truck with six colored children on top,” White wrote in an affidavit prepared for Florida officials. “White children stood around and jeered the Negroes who were leaving, threatened them with burning if they did not hurry up and get away. These children thought it a huge joke that some Negroes had been burned alive.”

Walter White didn’t visit the scene of every lynching in America in the 1920s—more than 300 people were lynched during that decade—but he investigated dozens, including the bloodiest.

In June 1921, he traveled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where rumors that a Black messenger boy had assaulted a White woman led mobs to burn more than 1,000 buildings in Greenwood, Tulsa’s Black neighborhood, killing between 100 and 300 people (“What Was Lost,” December 2021). White arrived two days later and soon had managed to enroll in an otherwise all-White posse. “Now you can go out and shoot any nigger you see,” a fellow posse member gleefully informed him, “and the law’ll be behind you.”

White’s accounts of lynchings ran in the New York Post, the Chicago Daily News, The Nation, and The New Republic. He also testified before congressional committees. But his favorite venue for telling his stories was in appearances before Black audiences across America. In those presentations, White did not ignore the inescapable horrors of his subject, but he preferred to emphasize the comedy of his role when conducting an investigation: He was a small, bespectacled Black man who posed as White and repeatedly bamboozled racist rubes into revealing their foul deeds.

“Black men and women filled the halls and lodges and churches where he appeared, laughing along with his tales of fooling the white man on their behalf,” Thomas Dyja wrote in his 2008 biography of White. “With these stories, White created a character, a skinny young black trickster who walked into the teeth of danger in the name of justice and who came out not only alive but laughing.”

Unfortunately, no recording or transcript of any of those speeches exists. But “I Investigate Lynchings,” an essay White wrote for H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine in 1929, provides a hint of his comic style.

“Nothing contributes so much to the continued life of an investigator of lynchings, and his tranquil possession of all his limbs, as the obtuseness of the lynchers themselves,” White wrote. “Like most boastful people who practice direct action when it involves no personal risk, they just can’t help but talk about their deeds to any person who manifests even the slightest interest in them…They gabble on ad infinitum, apparently unable to keep from talking.”

“With his high-pitched voice, love of a joke and relentless energy, his speeches were entertainment of a high order,” Dyja wrote. “When the audience left, they told their neighbors the stories they’d heard from this character Walter White, who tricked out lynchers for the NAACP.”

White didn’t spend all his days nvestigating lynchings. He continued working in the NAACP office, attending to paperwork, dealing with local chapters, organizing conferences. In 1922, he married Gladys Powell, an NAACP stenographer, and soon fathered two children. He wrote two novels of Black life—Fire in the Flint and Flight—and participated in the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1927, White received a $2,500 Guggenheim fellowship to spend a year abroad while writing another novel. He moved his family to the French Riviera, but he didn’t write the novel. Instead, he wrote what he described as “a study of the complex influences—economic, political, social, religious, sexual—behind the gruesome phenomenon of lynching.”

He titled the book Rope and Faggot. Citing his own work and statistics gathered by scholars, White disputed the notion that most lynchings were responses to claims that Black men had raped or propositioned White women. Such alleged incidents accounted for less than 30 percent of lynchings and, White argued, most interracial sex was consensual. Far more often, a lynching’s cause was economic—to keep Black farmworkers subjugated or to punish prosperous African Americans. And most mob killings occurred in small, backward, rural towns where, White noted sarcastically, “lynching often takes the place of the merry-go–round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra and other diversions common to large communities.”

Published in 1929, Rope and Faggot received excellent press. Time magazine praised White’s book as an “arresting exposition of a not-yet-vanished U.S. folkway.” That review inspired a reader in Atlanta to write in a letter to the editor, “Down here we don’t care if all the Negroes are lynched, or even burned or slit open with knives.”

In 1929, White became the head of the NAACP. He led the group for 25 years. During his tenure as executive director, the organization achieved its greatest triumph when in 1954 NAACP lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall, convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to declare segregation in public schools unconstitutional (“Becoming Jane Crow,” February 2022).

A year later, when White, 61, died of a heart attack, The New York Times called him “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.” More than 1,800 people packed his Harlem funeral and thousands more lined the streets to watch a hearse carry the man known as “Mr. NAACP” to his grave.

Today, if you ask the average American, Black or White, “Who was Walter White?,” you’re liable to get a blank stare, though fans of long-form TV might perk up and say, “Walter White was the chemistry teacher turned meth dealer played by Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad.” But the real Walter White—who repeatedly risked his life to expose the horrors of lynching—is, as biographer Thomas Dyja lamented, “all but forgotten.”

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

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For his 108th birthday, an original member of the Montford Point Marines ― the group of the first Black troops to enlist in the Marine Corps ― was recognized for his years of dedicated service across three military conflicts.

Cosmas D. Eaglin Sr. of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was presented earlier in January with a certificate of appreciation and a challenge coin from the North Carolina Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, according to a statement from the department.

“When I learned of Mr. Eaglin and his service to our country, I found it truly admirable and an inspiration,” retired Lt. General Walter E. Gaskin, the secretary of the state military department, said in the news release.

“As an original Montford Point Marine, he endured unimaginable obstacles in the segregated Marine Corps,” he said. “Because he was a Marine, I am able to be a Marine. His contributions to the nation and the Marine Corps will be remembered and his legacy will live on for generations to come.”

Eaglin was one of the first Black Marine recruits to train at Camp Montford Point in Jacksonville, North Carolina — nearby Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina — after President Franklin Roosevelt issued a 1941 executive order that took a step toward ending racial segregation in the military.

During the 1940s, approximately 20,000 Black Marines trained at Montford Point, now named Camp Gilbert H. Johnson after one of the first Black recruits there.

In 2022, for the 80th anniversary of the arrival of the initial Black recruits at Montford Point, many of the surviving veterans met back at their old training base for a ceremony celebrating the historic legacy of the Black service members who helped pave the way for integration in the Marine Corps and throughout the services.

Born in 1915 in Opelousas, Louisiana, Eaglin worked in agriculture after high school until he earned his teaching certificate in 1939, according to a bio shared with Marine Corps Times from the North Carolina DMVA Director of Communications Tammy Martin.

In 1942, Eaglin joined the Marine Corps at 27 years old, the statement said. He served two years in the Solomon Islands campaign during World War II, but left the service after the war.

Following a brief stint in Oakland, California, with his family, Eaglin decided to join the Army, which took him on assignments back east in Georgia, Kentucky and Maryland for training.

In the midst of the Korean War, the soldier earned his paratrooper wings and was assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1951. He later served a three-year assignment in Germany from 1956–1959 with Operation Gyroscope and did two tours in Vietnam, the bio said.

Now, at the North Carolina State Veterans Home in Fayetteville, Eaglin focuses on his faith and family, including his six children, seven grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, the news release said.

Originally published on Military Times, our sister publication.

The legendary 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — the only all-Black, all-female unit deployed during World War II — will soon have its day on the silver screen.

Actor, comedian and director Tyler Perry will produce the war movie “Six Triple Eight” for Netflix, according to a release from the streaming platform.

“The 6888th Battalion contributed to the war effort in a unique way: by sorting through a three-year backlog of undelivered mail and delivering the mail to American soldiers far from home,” the release notes. “In the face of discrimination and a vast, unfamiliar country divided by a global conflict, these 855 women brought hope to the front lines.”

Efforts by the battalion, which was helmed by Maj. Charity Adams — the first Black woman to commission with the U.S. Army — were essential for service members eager to hear from loved ones back home. The backlog of mail they sorted in Birmingham, England, was set to take six months to sort and pass along to the front lines. However, the 6888th Battalion was so efficient that they did it in three. The same thing happened when they were transferred to Rouen, France.

“When they completed their mission, the women of the 6888th had broken all records for redirecting mail, sorting an average of 5.85 million parcels per month,” the Arlington National Cemetery records indicate.

Despite facing racial discrimination, the personnel of the 6888th helped blaze a trail for the diversification of the U.S. military.

“They proved, like others had before them, that African American women wanted to serve their country nobly in a time of crisis, and they provided an enduring legacy for future generations of military women,” the Arlington archives note.

Perry reportedly based the movie’s script on a 2021 WWII History magazine article by Kevin M. Hymel, according to Netflix.

The streaming service, for which Perry has directed three prior projects, has not yet announced a release date.

Originally published by Military Times, our sister publication.

The iconography of the Union crusade against slavery can be symbolized in a book, a song, and a photograph. The book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was read by hundreds of thousands; the song “John Brown’s Body,” was sung by tens of thousands of blue-coated emancipators; and the photograph was the hideously scarred back of a Black man known variously as Gordon, the whipped Peter, or merely the scarred slave. It’s the photograph and the story behind it that director Antoine Fuqua has taken as the subject of “Emancipation,” and he has harnessed the star power of Will Smith to depict the unrelenting cruelty of the South’s “peculiar institution.”

Slavery, like the Holocaust, is almost impossible to portray through any medium. But Fuqua and Smith have marshalled their considerable talents to produce a film that is hard to watch and impossible to look away from. The R rating is visible in nearly every celluloid frame. A brief summary of the real Gordon’s harrowing escape saga, given when he staggered into the encampment of several Massachusetts regiments of the Union’s 19th Corps outside Baton Rouge, La., in March 1863, will put the historical accuracy of William A. Collage’s sparse script to the test.

The historical Gordon escaped from the 3,000-acre cotton plantation of John Lyons, located along the west bank of the Atchafalaya River in St. Landry Parish, near today’s Krotz Springs, La. He spent 10 hellish days in the region’s swamps avoiding the relentless pursuit of blood hounds handled by the plantation’s overseer, Artayou Carrier. Gordon carried onions in his pockets to hide his scent from the pursuing dogs. New Orleans–based photographers William D. McPherson and his partner, Mr. Oliver, happened to be in the Union camp when Gordon stumbled in. They produced carte-de-visite photos of Gordon seated, stripped to the waist, his back showing the deep welts that crisscrossed his skin from his shoulders to his waist.

The photograph was reproduced by the thousands in the North and became an instant sensation. The photo appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly, the country’s most widely read journal during the Civil War. Gordon subsequently enlisted in the Louisiana Native Guards and fought at Port Hudson in July 1863. His life after the war is unknown.

Echoes of the Holocaust are unmistakable throughout the movie. In the film, Smith, playing Gordon, is torn from his wife, played by Charmaine Bingwa, and his children in a scene of random violence and thoughtless cruelty that will be repeated in many guises throughout the movie. Along with other slaves, Smith is herded into a prison-like cart and sent to labor alongside Confederate deserters rebuilding a railroad. Under concentration camp-like conditions, the worst of human nature becomes commonplace. Through senseless acts of sadism, men are worked like animals until they die and then their bodies are tossed into a mass grave.

The muted cinematography of Robert Richardson gives these scenes a documentary-like look—intended, probably, to symbolize the hopelessness forced upon slave laborers everywhere. “Where is God?” asks a dispirited slave. His answer, “He is nowhere,” is a reality Gordon cannot accept. It sparks his determination to escape from this environment of relentless evil and twisted humanity. Gordon’s inner strength comes from his determination to return and free his still enslaved family.

Smith portrays his 10 days on the run in the swamps with muted desperation and internalized rage. There is little dialogue and Smith’s physicality moves the action forward. Fuqua turns Louisiana into a Biblical wasteland through which Gordon must journey to find freedom and salvation. Smith faces and overcomes the worst forces of nature, including mud, snakes, and even alligators, as cruel and unrelenting as his life on the plantation.

In a sense, “Emancipation” is a story of redemption, and every redemption film needs an evil adversary that must be overcome. Smith finds his nemesis in Fassel, the overseer, portrayed with menacing determination by Ben Foster. “You walk the earth because I let you,” he snarls. Living under the capriciousness of someone having the power of life and death over another human being is the fate all enslaved must endure.

Fuqua’s film is without nuance, which denies him complete development of his characters. But “Emancipation” differs from other Hollywood efforts to portray slavery. There is no Lost Cause mythology, no redemptive whites to mitigate the worst aspects of the institution they have created and control. “Emancipation” is an unflinching exposure of an overwhelming corruption. But it is also an affirmation of the human spirit’s ability to overcome and survive. The film had a brief theatrical release and streams on Apple TV+ Starting December 9.

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After spending a sleepless Saturday night in a sketchy Richmond hotel, I drive surprisingly uncongested highways to the unheralded New Market Heights battlefield, where U.S. Colored Troops made history. Promptly at 8:30 a.m., I arrive at the already crowded Four Mile Creek Park parking lot, located behind a snake-rail fence astride New Market Road. All my deep-weeds battlefield walk essentials are accounted for: bug spray, long pants, hiking boots, water, snacks, a cellphone and backpack, and curiosity.

Days earlier, Tim Talbott—my New Market Heights guide—had messaged me a warning: “It’s supposed to be as hot as blue blazes.” His forecast proves spot-on. Virginia in late July is hell with the lid off. But I figure Talbott—the 52-year-old Central Virginia Battlefields Trust chief administrative officer—won’t mind.

“It’s always an honor to be on that ground,” he messaged me in a follow-up to his weather report.

In the parking lot in Henrico, 10 miles southeast of downtown Richmond, Talbott and I exchange pleasantries. This is our first meeting in person, although we’ve made dozens of Civil War–related connections online. Talbott wears blue jeans, an olive ballcap with the CVBT logo, and a maroon T-shirt. Strands of gray appear in the soft-spoken Tennessee native’s black goatee. He lives in Fredericksburg, Va., a 70-mile drive north on beastly Interstate 95.

Talbott has secured permission from Henrico County for us to walk the core New Market Heights battlefield, where, on September 29, 1864, 14 U.S. Colored Troops soldiers and two of their white officers earned the Medal of Honor. The county owns the most important swath of the battlefield, now blanketed by a forest of pine, holly, gum, and oak.

Our battlefield walk begins at a large garbage dumpster, behind a Dairy Queen on the opposite side of New Market Road. Three feral cats—two black, one gray—scatter as we walk toward them and disappear into the woods.

New Market Heights has been stiff-armed in the history books, but it is Talbott’s favorite battlefield. Armchair historians sometimes confuse it with the Battle of New Market, fought in the Shenandoah Valley in mid-May 1864. Talbott’s interest in the battle stems from a talk given by a professional historian nearly 20 years ago.

“The way he told the story made it come alive,” he says while brushing away pine branches along our narrow path through the woods.

My interest in New Market Heights stems from a meeting at nearby Fort Harrison weeks earlier with Damon Radcliffe, the great-great-grandson of Edward Ratcliff. A former slave, Edward served in the 38th U.S. Colored Troops and received one of those 14 Medals of Honor. Damon and I couldn’t walk the battlefield that day, but I vowed to return. My mantra: If you want to understand a battle, you must walk the ground.

Fifteen minutes into our walk, we reach a section of woods where the earth undulates, like a haphazardly tossed brown blanket. We have arrived at the remains of earthworks created by the famed Texas Brigade.

“Used to be chest high,” Talbott says of defenses, now only as high as three feet in places.

Piles of brown leaves, as well as gnarly tree roots, scattered broken twigs, tree branches and limbs, carpet the forest floor. Mayflies make pests of themselves while cicadas buzz and click. About a half-mile away, traffic hums on six lanes of Interstate 295, which slices through the battlefield like a bayonet through the heart.

In a charge about daybreak toward the earthworks, Black troops shouted: “Remember Fort Pillow! No quarter for the Rebels.” Nearly six months earlier, troops commanded by Nathan Bedford Forrest had massacred USCT at Fort Pillow in Tennessee.

On that bleak, foggy morning at New Market Heights, Black soldiers were out for revenge and a chance to prove their mettle. With one great push by the Union Army, USCT soldiers could soon be marching into the capital of the Confederacy.

Behind earthworks, the Texas Brigade, some 2,000-strong, fired thousands of rounds into the oncoming USCT soldiers they despised. Meanwhile, Rebel artillery, positioned at opposite ends of the heights behind the brigade, poured iron into the USCT.

Fifty to 75 yards in front of their earthworks, the Rebels had placed abatis—sharpened tree branches—and wooden chevaux de fries, the distant cousin of barbed wire. Gaps in the defenses funneled the Black soldiers into a kill zone.

“The Texans,” a Georgia officer wrote, “killed niggers galore.”

Confederate soldiers occasionally advanced beyond their earthworks to strip the dead of shoes, weapons, and ammunition. They murdered at least one captured USCT soldier behind their lines.

Talbott and I venture deeper into the woods, to get a USCT soldier’s perspective of the battlefield.

Perspiration pours down my arm, soaking my reporter’s notebook and blurring my scribbled words. I’ve never sweat so much on a battlefield—even in Resaca, Ga., during a reenactment on a blistering mid-May afternoon.

Soon, the drone of interstate traffic becomes a memory. The ground slopes gently up toward the Texas Brigade’s earthworks, which stretched for roughly ¾ of a mile. But the tree-covered landscape—largely open ground in 1864—makes New Market Heights mostly a battlefield of the mind.

To create a path through the woods, Talbott uses a long stick to swat away holly branches and spider webs. Neither of us wants to take home a blood-sucking tick as a memory of this experience.

“Is this remote enough for you?” Talbott asks.

Eighty yards or so beyond Rebel earthworks, we stop at the edge of a 50-acre rock quarry filled with water—a nasty 20th-century scar on hallowed ground.

“A friend of mine jokes that you could only give kayak tours here now,” Talbott says. 

In Talbott’s perfect world, the quarry would be emptied and filled in. The battlefield where hundreds of Black soldiers and their White officers shed blood would be restored to its 1864 appearance and interpreted. Soldiers such as Corporal Miles James of the 36th USCT, among the 14 Medal of Honor recipients from this battle, would be at least as well-known as Benjamin Butler—the Army of the James general who commanded them.

Born in Princess Anne County, Va., James had enlisted in Norfolk in November 1863. A 34-year-old farmer, he probably was enslaved before the war. He stood 5 feet 7 with black eyes and hair.

Within 30 yards of Texas Brigade defenses, a bullet burrowed into James’ upper left arm, shattering bone. Somehow the corporal continued to load and fire his weapon with his good arm, urging on comrades as the battle swirled. James endured the amputation of his useless limb on the battlefield. Later, the corporal received treatment at Fort Monroe, 75 miles east in the Virginia coast, and a promotion to sergeant.

Despite losing an arm—a golden ticket out of the service if he wanted it—James refused to leave the army. In February 1865, Colonel Alonzo Draper—who commanded James’ brigade at New Market Heights—wrote Fort Monroe’s chief surgeon:

“He is one of the bravest men I ever saw; and is in every respect a model soldier. He is worth more with his single arm, than half a dozen ordinary men.”

James served in the U.S. Army until a disability discharge in October 1865. Hundreds of other Black soldiers like him, nearly all of them former slaves, fought as well as James at New Market Heights.

“Unbelievable bravery,” Talbott says of the USCT.

At Four Mile Creek, which snakes its way through the battlefield before dumping into the James River, Talbott and I talk about the white officers on horseback who became prime targets of the Rebels.

“This is where the Rebels thought the USCT would become nothing but rabble after the officers fell,” Talbott says. The creek itself became a devilish impediment to USCT soldiers under withering fire.

At creekside, I learn more about Talbott, too.

He grew up in Madison, Ind., a stop on the Underground Railroad—the network escaped slaves used to flee to free states and Canada. At his 1,000-student high school, he played football (“not very well”) and grew to enjoy rap and hip-hop—which some of his white peers thought strange.

Talbott’s high school history teacher—“a 1960s hippie”—exposed him to “all the cultural stuff,” including the Civil Rights era and two of its leading personalities, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. For the past 30 years, he has immersed himself in the experiences of Black people during the Civil War.

On his phone, Talbott displays wallpaper of Frederick Douglass—the famous Black orator, abolitionist, writer, and reformer. The copy of the painting on his maroon T-shirt, now drenched with sweat, is of a one-legged USCT soldier on crutches. Talbott dreams of a monument at Four Mile Creek Park to honor the USCT, who forced the Texas Brigade to fall back to a secondary line. The Black troops ultimately entered Richmond, but not until after the capital’s fall in April 1865.

As we walk through the Virginia forest, Talbott and I wonder why this battle—and this battlefield—have been consigned to the shadows of history. Racism? Indifference? Ignorance? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, an effort failed by a Black military history group to have the battlefield named a National Historic Landmark.

Thankfully, hundreds of acres of the New Market Heights battlefield have been saved by the American Battlefield Trust and other preservation groups. But much has been lost forever because of modern development.

Two hours after our walk began, sweaty and dirty, we leave the woods and September 1864 behind. On a pathway along New Market Road to the Four Mile Creek Park parking lot, Talbott and I talk about the battle, preservation, and Civil War memory.

“Many people say they love history, but what they really love is nostalgia,” he says. “I love messy history. That’s where the good stuff is.”

Messy history—that’s a perfect encapsulation of the Battle of New Market Heights.

John Banks, author of two Civil War books, has another one coming in 2023. Check out A Civil War Road Trip of a Lifetime (Gettysburg Publishing) for more on this story. For more on New Market Heights, including soldier stories, go to battleofnewmarketheights.org

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

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Black and White children as schoolmates. A Black sergeant assigned to command over 70 mostly White soldiers. Black clergymen leading mixed-race congregations. Skilled Black craftsmen highly respected by White members of their communities. Do these citations sound like examples of the progress America has made in overcoming racism? They’re actually examples of life in the early 19th-century South.

If critics and admirers of the Old South agree on one thing it’s that Civil War-era attitudes toward slavery and race were grounded in long-standing tradition. Admirers claim that that tradition blinded otherwise decent people. Critics see evidence of a thoroughly corrupt society. Shadow unmasks a different reality.

Slavery and racism existed from early days in colonial America, but a certain fluidity characterized these phenomena for over two centuries before attitudes hardened. At first slaves could own property, sometimes earning enough by hiring themselves to buy their freedom. Some free Blacks were aristocrats, even slaveowners. Whites commonly accepted free Blacks of their own class as at least more or less equals. Believers in “racial superiority” didn’t necessarily treat that construct as a White/non-White issue. Some persons of Anglo-Saxon ancestry considered themselves superior to White people from other origins.

Such a mix of attitudes typified the revolutionary era and the republic’s early days. Many on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line favored gradually ending slavery. Newer, extreme views gained credence among southerners in the 1820s. “Scientific racism” replaced unthinking prejudice, with adherents claiming to be able to perceive a strict biological hierarchy among races. This “scientific” mode of analysis would affect the status of people with one Black great-grandparent in ways the older view never did. Slavery came to be seen as a great good—not merely “acceptable” or a way to avoid something worse.

So while abolitionism bloomed and grew in the North, the South began codifying the slave system in terms stricter than ever while moving toward a subjugation of the region’s 250,000 free Black residents that culminated in Jim Crow. Shadow tells how those free southern Blacks survived and fought back, aided by White neighbors opposed to the new policies. This fascinating story shows that early America was more benign—and the antebellum south more sinister—than generally realized. —James Baresel is a freelance writer in Annandale, Virginia.

This book review appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South

by Warren Eugene Milteer

University of North Carolina Press, 2021

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