The Best American History Essays 2007

The Best American History Essays 2007

Edited by
Jacqueline Jones
for the
Organization ofAmerican Historians

palgrave
macmilan
THE BEST AMERICAN HISTORY ESSAYS 2007
© Organization of American Historians, 2007.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7659-8
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quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2007 by
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DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-06439-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The best American history essays 2007/ edited by jacqueline jones for
the Organization of American Historians.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. United States-History. 2. American essays. 3. United
States-Historiography. I. jones, jacqueline, 1948-11. Organization of
American Historians.
E178.6.B53 2007
973-dc22 2006050719
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 Contents

List of Illustrations Vll

Acknowledgments IX

Introduction 1
Jacqueline Jones
Chapter 1 From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian
Women in the Borderlands 13
Juliana Barr
From The Journal of American History

Chapter 2 "Meddling with Emancipation:" Baptists,

Authority, and the Rift over Slavery in
the Upper South 47
Monica Najar
From The Journal of the Early Republic

Chapter 3 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 71

Stephen Aron
From Southern California Quarterly

Chapter 4 Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and

Frances Wright in America, 1818-1826 89
Gail Bederman
From American Literary History

Chapter 5 Outlawing "Coolies": Race, Nation, and

Empire in the Age of Emancipation 111
Moon-Ho Jung
From American Quarterly

palgrave
Chapter 6 "The Dread Void of Uncertainty": Naming the
Dead in the American Civil War 135
macmillan Drew Gilpin Faust
From Southern Cultures
VI Contents

Chapter 7 Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and

the "Social Game" in the U.S. Foreign Service,
1905-1941 155
Molly M. Wood
From The Journal of Women's History

Chapter 8 The Flying Machine in the Garden: Parks and

Airports, 1918-1938 175
Janet R. Daly Bednarek
From Technology and Culture
Chapter 9 Miscegenation and Competing Definitions of Race in
Twentieth-Century Louisiana 199
Michelle Brattain
From The Journal of Southern History
Chapter 10 The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political
Uses of the Past 235
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
From The Journal of American History

Other Articles Nominated for the 2007 Competition 273

Index 275
 List of Illustrations

1.1 Major Indian, Spanish, and French settlements in

Spanish Texas, French Louisiana, Apacherfa,
Comancherfa, and the territories of Caddo and
Witchita peoples. 15
1.2 Lipan Apache Indians North of the Rio Grande,
ca. 1834-1836. 27
3.1 Lewis and Clark plush toy. 73
3.2 Portrait of Meriwether Lewis. 77
3.3 Portrait of William Clark. 79
4.1 Frances Wright. 91
5.1 The inhumanity of the "coolie" trade. 121
5.2 Dehumanized "coolies." 121
6.1 On the battlefield of Antietam. 137
6.2 Civil War dead at the Battle of Antietam. 141
6.3 Clara Barton. 142
6.4 Confederate General Robert E. Lee and
Union General Joseph Hooker. 144
6.5 Dedication ceremony at the Andersonville
National Cemetery, 1865. 150
8.1 Charles A. Lindbergh, 1925. 179
8.2 Washington-Hoover Airport, 1932. 180
9.1 Isaac and Rosa, emancipated slave children, ca. 1863. 205
9.2 Portrait of Governor Luther Egbert Hall and
judges of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, ca. 1913. 207
10.1 Protesters at the 1963 Civil Rights March
on Washington, DC. 250
10.2 Civil Rights leaders and marchers being
photographed at the 1963 Civil Rights
March on Washington, DC. 250
 Acknowledgments

The 2007 edition of the Best American History Essays was prepared by its
editor, Jacqueline Jones, and the hardworking individuals who comprised
the editorial board: Anthony J. Badger, John M. Belohlavek, Ellen Carol
DuBois, Eric Foner, Sharon Harley, M. Ruth Kelly, John Saillant, and Elliott
West. We would like to thank them for their efforts in selecting the ten arti-
cles from the hundreds of journals and magazines they scoured looking for
the best American history published between the summers of 2005
and 2006. In addition, we want to acknowledge and thank those involved
in producing the inaugural edition of the Best American History Essays in
2006. Under the careful editorship of Joyce Appleby, University of
California, Los Angeles professor emerita, and past president of the
Organization of American Historians (OAH), the following American
historians invested their time and energy to assemble the 2006 volume:
Anthony J. Badger, John Belohlavek, Flannery Burke, David Goldfield,
M. Ruth Kelly, Jill Lepore, John Saillant, George Sanchez, and Gordon Wood.
We would also like to thank the following staff at the Organization of
American Historians executive office, whose hard work behind the scenes
helped bring these editions to print: Kevin Byrne, Amanda Dollar, Keith
Eberly, Susan Ferentinos, Terry Govan, Jason Groth, Kara Hamm, Phillip
Guerty, Matthew Laird, Susanna Robbins, Amy Stark, and Annette
Wind horn. We must also thank OAH Publications Director Michael Regoli
and former OAH Deputy Director John Dichtl.
Finally, we want to thank Brendan O'Malley who first brought the idea
of a Best American History Essays volume to OAH more than three years
ago. We also appreciate the efforts of our colleagues at Palgrave Macmillan,
especially editor Alessandra Bastagli, Erin Ivy, and Emily Leithauser, who
made these volumes possible.

-Lee W. Formwalt
Executive Director, Organization of American Historians
 Introduction

Jacqueline Jones

For avid readers of history, the historical essay offers all the pleasures of a
book, compressed; here, in just thirty pages or so, are the elements that
make historical scholarship such a compelling literary genre-a good story,
well told and thoroughly researched, a narrative that illuminates the past
and, in some cases, inspires fresh ways of looking at the present. Indeed, a
case can be made that the history essay compares to a book the same way a
short story compares to a novel: The shorter work provides the gratification
and intellectual stimulation of the longer one, but the story moves more
briskly, and the reader is rewarded more quickly.
And so it is lamentable that most history readers never encounter the very
best essays, many of which are published and widely scattered in more than
three hundred journals devoted to historical scholarship. The vast majority
of these journals are highly specialized and readily available only to mem-
bers of professional historical organizations and to scholars and students
with access to extensive libraries. The purpose of this volume is to gather
between two covers ten essays that represent the best in current scholarship,
and to bring to a wider audience outstanding works in American history
that would otherwise reach only a small audience.
These essays were chosen by a hardworking committee of eight people,
all members of the Organization of American Historians, the largest profes-
sional organization of historians of the United States. The committee's task
was to survey an impressive variety and number of scholarly journals and
general interest magazines, and to choose from them a handful of essays
notable for their overall excellence and for their accessibility to a wider
audience. Committee members included Anthony J. Badger, John M.
Belohlavek, Ellen Carol DuBois, Eric Foner, Sharon Harley, M. Ruth Kelly,
John Saillant, and Elliott West. The group followed a grueling schedule that
spanned five months and culminated in mid-May, when most members
faced a crushing end-of-year workload. In the spring of 2006, that work-
load included not only the usual tasks of grading papers and preparing for
commencement exercises, but also the challenge of voting for ten essays out
2 Jacqueline Jones

of a shortlist of thirty-seven nominees. Essays on the shortlist appeared in

thirty-one different (for the most part highly specialized) publications,
including, among others, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Sport
History Review, Columbia Journal of Law, Journal of Urban History, New
Political Science, Teachers College Record, and Journal of Military History.
Taken together, these ten essays are a testament to the richness and vital-
ity of current scholarship in the field of American history. In theme and time
period, they range widely over the vast landscape of the American past, in
all its fascinating detail and diversity-from the late eighteenth-century
borderlands inhabited by Indians, French, and Spanish to contentious
debates over slavery in the Baptist churches of early nineteenth-century
Kentucky; to Civil War battlefields with their bloody harvests of corpses; to
twentieth-century Midwestern airports evolving from parklands to noisy
centers of commercial transportation; and recent debates over any number of
historical events and developments, including the Lewis and Clark
expedition of 1804-1806 and the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth
century. Of course American history encompasses far more than whatever
transpired on American soil; several essays suggest the necessity of tran-
scending national borders-to examine debates over Chinese immigrant
workers, or the housekeeping skills of wives of Foreign Service diplomats-
if we are to gain an appreciation of American history that is broadly
defined. The historians represented in this collection have employed a num-
ber of different research methodologies and have examined an array of his-
torical sources, including, to name but a few, legal and literary texts,
courtroom testimony, sermons and minutes of church meetings, federal and
local government records, Congressional testimony, city recreation commis-
sion reports, letters, diaries, oral history testimony, travelers' accounts, news-
papers, advertisements, records of commercial transactions, census data, and
political speeches. The footnotes of these works tell a story in themselves, and
suggest historians' new and creative ways of recapturing the country's past.
Published in nine different journals, these essays also illustrate the
excellence of specialized publications. Fittingly, the Journal of American
History, which publishes in all fields, is represented by two articles in this
collection. The other journals include American Quarterly, Journal of the
Early Republic, American Literary History, Southern California Quarterly,
Technology and Culture, Southern Cultures, Journal of Southern History,
and Journal of Women's History. Most of these journals find their way into
the hands only of the dues-paying members of the professional organizations
that publish them-for example, the Organization of American Historians
(Journal of American History), the Southern Historical Association (Journal
of Southern History), and the American Studies Association (American
Quarterly). However, like many other articles published in these journals, the
ten included here deserve a wide and appreciative readership.
Certainly the art of the historical essay has received far less attention than
the art of the short story. The relatively short length of the essay belies the
amount of time necessary to perfect it. In many cases, article-length
 Introduction 3

manuscripts undergo a lengthy process of revision and resubmission to a

particular journal, or even, in some instances, to several different journals,
before they are accepted for publication. Editors send manuscripts to as
many as seven different readers, who in some instances offer wildly contra-
dictory reports to the author. Overall favorable reviews are no guarantee
that a manuscript will be accepted; instead, such reviews often contain
multiple suggestions for revisions and additional research, prompting inten-
sive rewriting. The whole unwieldy process can consume many months, or
even a number of years, from initial submission to final publication. In
several essays, either in the first note or in prefatory material to the notes,
the author acknowledges the comments and suggestions offered by an array
of friends, colleagues, students, conference participants, and anonymous
journal readers. Like a book, the history essay, then, is often the product of
a grueling regimen and of a broader collective effort than the lone author's
name might imply.
These essays explore a variety of topics that range widely over time and
space, with some narrowing in on a case study and others taking a more
capacious view of the past. At the same time the essays illustrate a number
of interlocking themes and overlapping research methodologies revealing of
the state of historical scholarship in the early twenty-first century. Several
introduce us to relatively new fields, such as the history of the environment
and the "new" foreign relations history. Taken individually and as a group,
the essays also reveal the creative strategies of historians who are bringing
women into stories about the past. A number focus on the problem of
slavery and other tangible forms of racial ideologies that transcend a
black-white binary. The authors represented here also explore the politics of
remembering-how we as a nation memorialize the past and construct
stories to illuminate it. Several consider the ways that different groups of
Americans have constructed, acknowledged, and honored the notion and
the reality of citizenship. Additionally, the essays offer pointed critiques of
bland textbook renderings of the past, and of national mythologies that are
marketed by enterprising merchandisers and entertainment companies.
Readers will find these essays stimulating and provocative, and in some
cases disturbing. In other words, these works will evoke a range of emo-
tional and intellectual responses in ways that good literature always does.
In order to provide a more accurate view of the past, recent historians
have broadened traditional subfields of history, and opened up new areas of
inquiry. For example, scholars working in the traditional field of American
diplomatic history tended to focus on international conflicts and high-level
negotiations; these writers looked to the decisions made by presidents,
prime ministers, and generals to explore America's place in the world. In
contrast, scholars working in the field of the "new" foreign relations history
look beyond the roles of heads of state and military officials in crafting
foreign policy. These historians take a broader perspective that takes into
account international labor relations, changing ideas of race and other
notions of social difference, and the effects of domestic political and social
4 Jacqueline Jones

developments on the relations between the United States and other

countries. For example, in his essay, "Outlawing 'Coolies': Race, Nation,
and Empire in the Age of Emancipation," Moon-Ho Jung explores the
mid-nineteenth-century debate over the importation of Chinese workers
called "coolies," a largely derogatory term connoting unfree, or enslaved,
slave labor. 1 Jung explores a question that increasingly preoccupied
landowners all over the world: How best to deploy large labor forces in the
sugar, cotton, and rice fields in response to an expanding global market for
staple crops? Jung views the United States as part of a larger system of
transnational labor migrations in the nineteenth century, and relates this
debate to the controversy over slavery in antebellum America, where
abolitionists and their adversaries were contemplating a nation-and a
world-purged of unfree labor. Thus he shows that the concern over
importing large numbers of Chinese workers was not just an American
story, but one linked to the wider imperial policies of European powers
shaping the Caribbean and Asia throughout this period. In the United States,
some slave owners and employers saw these workers as a transitional work-
force bridging the institution of slavery and free labor, and hence a group to
be welcomed, or feared, depending on one's perspective. Jung reminds us of
the spectrum of labor systems that have shaped American history-not just
slavery and free labor at either extreme, but also indentured servitude and
apprenticeship in between.
Writing about a completely different topic, Molly M. Wood nonetheless
joins with Jung in challenging the traditional view of American foreign
relations as a domain inhabited only by powerful men crafting diplomacy in
the suites of palaces and the offices of the U.S. State Department. In
"Diplomatic Wives: The Politics of Domesticity and the 'Social Game' in the
U.S. Foreign Service, 1905-1941," she suggests that the U.S. households
established abroad carried great symbolic and practical significance within
the realm of diplomatic overtures and negotiations. 2 The Foreign Service
diplomatic corps consisted of husbands and wives who forged partnerships to
conduct diplomacy outside formal meetings-at parties and receptions and
around the dinner table. Within these informal venues, women as wives and
mothers served as highly visible ambassadors of American prosperity as well
as agents of formal diplomatic initiatives. Wood also explores the ways that
wives' interaction with native-born servants revealed the American women's
own class and cultural assumptions. And she discusses the hierarchy of age
and status among the wives themselves, a hierarchy that encouraged older
women to serve as mentors to their young counterparts, instructing them in
their daunting responsibilities. At a time when relations with other countries
were assuming an ever more critical role in U.S. politics and society, the
politics of domesticity was a game, its rules being shaped by highly stylized
forms of etiquette that women as well as men were able to-and forced to-
master. The women who hoped to "win" this game had to be well trained and
well informed; the stakes were high: advancing their husbands' careers as well
as promoting the stipulated foreign policy interests of the United States.
 Introduction 5

If the new foreign relations history reveals fresh ways of looking at the
past, so too does the history of the environment, an emerging field that stresses
the social meanings and functions of the natural and built environment.
Writing about the complex interplay between technology and the environ-
ment, Janet R. Daly Bednarek explores the evolution of the modern airport
in her essay "The Flying Machine in the Garden: Parks and Airports,
1918-1938."3 For the most part, the earliest airports had functions quite
different from those of today. At the dawn of air travel, many people saw
airports as parkland, as places of recreation. Indeed, cities often paired
various forms of leisure-from swimming to horseshoes-with expansive
pieces of real estate that also included landing strips. During these early
years, people flocked to airports not to travel to distant places, but to relax
with their families, enjoy a picnic lunch, and watch the planes. Air races and
daredevil stunts and celebrity appearances and other forms of mass entertain-
ment were all part of the function of the early airport. Only later in the century
did city parks and recreation departments cede their airports to private
companies that specialized in the transportation of people, mail, and goods.
Like many good stories, this one is evocative: while reading it I began to
think back to the 1950s and the Sunday afternoons I spent with my parents
and two brothers at the New Castle County airport, a small regional airport
in northern Delaware. During World War II, my father, a licensed pilot and
technical sergeant, had served as Central Fire Control ("top gun") on a B-29
"Superfortress" bomber. Stationed in the South Pacific on the island of
Saipan, he and his crewmates flew thirty missions, most of them over
Japanese cities during the last nine months of the war. But a decade later, on
any particular Sunday afternoon, he could be found piling his wife and
daughter and two sons into the family's red Ford station wagon and driving
twenty minutes or so to the airport. There we would enjoy dinner together
and watch the planes land and take off. For my father, the airport had now
become a site not of danger, but of postwar domesticity, a place of leisure
and family togetherness. Contemplating the nature and function of today's
airport, more resembling an armed camp than a green space oasis, it is
difficult to imagine fighting one's way through security barriers and police
checks for the sole purpose of sharing a family meal, let alone finding a
place to spread out the picnic blanket. Bednarek's work introduces us to a
new dimension of the not-so-distant past, when flying machines and natural
landscapes complemented and did not war against each other.
Bednarek makes her case about the evolving functions of airports by
examining the cities of Wichita, Omaha, and Minneapolis. Her work
reminds us that case studies can help to reveal not just the particulars of
American history, but broader themes as well. Monica Najar's essay,
"'Meddling with Emancipation': Baptists, Authority, and the Rift over
Slavery in the Upper South," focuses on debates over slavery in Kentucky
Baptist churches around 1800. 4 By taking a relatively narrow view, she is
able to provide local texture to this widening crisis in American political life.
At the national level, politicians crafted tortuous compromises between the
6 Jacqueline Jones

free North and the slaveholding South, compromises that were reworked
and renewed through the 1850s. But at the local level, smaller bodies-in
this case church congregations-erupted into open conflict over the issue of
slavery, as the question of human bondage spilled out of the realm of religion
and into the realm of economy and society. In the young state of Kentucky,
homesteaders faced the arduous tasks of chopping down trees, clearing the
land, and planting and harvesting crops. Because these tasks often outstripped
the energies of anyone family, and because slavery was such a widely
accepted system of labor exploitation, many white Kentuckians embraced
the institution unequivocally.
However, Baptists faced a particular set of dilemmas: First, their faith,
and in many cases church membership rolls, presumed an equality among
congregants, rich and poor, male and female, black and white, slave and
free. Second, Baptist doctrine established church authority over their
members' social relations; but when certain ministers and congregants
began to speak out against human bondage, they provoked bitter contro-
versy within and among individual Baptist churches. By examining church
minutes and other records, Najar is able to reconstruct the conflict that tore
congregations apart and ultimately led Baptists in general to cede authority
over the master-slave relation to civil institutions such as state legislatures
and courts. In contrast to broader studies of slavery, Najar's essay shows the
nuances of localized debates within a literature that often casts the contro-
versy in broader, North-South terms.
In addition to Najar, several other authors take up the question of slavery
and its legacy as the great moral burden of a nation conceived in liberty and
freedom. Kentucky Baptists engaged in a bitter debate over the seeming
contradiction between their own high-minded egalitarianism on one hand
and the grim realities of homesteading on the other. More generally, this
disjuncture-between professed ideals of the nation's founders and the bru-
tal reality of chattel slavery-is a topic of enduring and widespread concern
among historians. In her essay titled, "Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia,
and Frances Wright in America," Gail Bederman focuses on a British
reformer and author determined to set in motion single-handedly a great
abolitionist project within the antebellum United States. 5 Frances Wright
viewed the United States as the most enlightened republic in the world, and
believed that bondage was but an aberration, a blot on the country's character
that, with some effort and determination, could be lifted from the fabric of
the young nation. Wright founded an experimental community she called
Neshoba, where, presumably, collective labor would enable a small number
of slaves to work hard and earn enough money to free themselves. Yet
Wright was a victim of her own ignorance and naivete, according to
Bederman. The reformer underestimated southern planters' dependence on
enslaved labor. Wright also failed to live up to her own egalitarian
principles, treating the enslaved residents of Nashoba as inferior beings who
must be shipped out of the country, to Haiti or Liberia, if and when they
earned their freedom.
 Introduction 7

Like Moon-Ho Jung and his work on Chinese "coolies," Juliana Barr
shows that the issue of slavery in general and unfree labor more particularly
is not one that we can confine within black-white dichotomies. Barr, in her
essay "From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the
Borderlands," calls our attention to a diversity of slave systems within terri-
tory that would eventually become part of the United States. 6 She suggests
that a relatively narrow view of slavery, one that focuses only on people of
African descent performing forced labor, ignores significant departures from
that particular form of bondage-specifically, the systems that developed in
areas of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Southwest occupied by
Indians, French, and Spanish in the late eighteenth century. Barr focuses on
the plight of Indian women and children captives, and contributes to our
understanding of the multiple ways groups in addition to people of African
descent were enslaved, and the various meanings attached to these forms of
slavery. In this borderlands area, French traders treated Indian women cap-
tives as pawns in negotiations, sources of prestige, currency of exchange, a
means of bonding between men of different cultural groups, and potential
sexual partners and wives in an area where women of French descent were
in short supply. While the French willingly enslaved Indian women, they
refrained from holding their coreligionists, the Spanish, in bondage. For
their part, Spanish colonial officials incorporated into their military strategies
the use of Indian women and children as captives of war and as political
hostages in a contested land marked by sporadic warfare and persistent
violence. Barr shows the multiple uses of enslaved persons-not just as
sources of exploitable labor, but as human pawns useful to powerful men of
all kinds.
Barr forces us to rethink the problem of racial ideologies-those
ever-changing notions of difference based on "racial" categories. Similarly,
Michelle Brattain's work stresses the fluidity of those notions, and more
particularly, the near impossibility of defining "racial" identities with any
precision, whether in the workplace or in a court of law. In "Miscegenation
and Competing Definitions of Race in Twentieth Century Louisiana," she
examines the efforts by Louisiana lawmakers, judges, and employers to
enforce a black-white definition of race.? Meanwhile, Louisiana (like all
other states) was populated by residents whose skin color and background
defied such easy categorization. Examining the testimony of witnesses in
antimiscegenation cases, Brattain finds ordinary individuals wrestling with
state-imposed racial definitions that remained at odds with their own rela-
tionships revolving around kin, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and sexual
partners. In Louisiana and no doubt all over the United States, people defied
the imperatives of a rigid "racial" segregation, identifying themselves and
other people along various lines of heritage, culture, and (for people with a
light skin color), individual choice. Indeed, Brattain suggests that people
constructed their own identities on the basis of whom they lived with and
established relationships with, and not on the basis of state-sanctioned
forms of "racial" difference.
8 Jacqueline Jones

Several authors introduce their essays by noting they hope to get beyond
glib textbook generalizations about the American past. For example, Gale
Bederman begins her subject, revisiting Nashoba, with the observation that
many textbook authors describe that community as a beacon of harmony, a
successful example of interracial living in the wilderness of American
proslavery sentiment. In this view, Frances Wright was a visionary who chal-
lenged prevailing ideas about the proper role of women and black men. On
the contrary, Bederman, asserts, Wright had no intention of treating blacks
as equals, and she failed miserably at running a collective enterprise.
Stephen Aron revisits a famous episode in his essay, "The Afterlives of
Lewis and Clark."8 The two explorers have received a great deal of
attention recently-not just from textbook authors, but also from museum
curators and merchandisers of everything from dolls to cookbooks and
playing cards. Aron points out that in the last few years the expedition has
often been rendered in broad strokes for the general public as a milestone in
multicultural goodwill. In this view, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis
established friendly relations with the Indians they encountered, and inte-
grated an Indian, Sacagawea, and a black slave, York, as full and equal
members into their Corps of Discovery. Aron disputes this view by looking
into the posttrek careers of both Lewis and Clark, when Lewis served as the
governor of the new, expansive Louisiana Territory, and Clark went on to
become a brigadier general of the Louisiana territorial militia and superin-
tendent of Indian affairs. In contrast to their two-and-a-half years exploring
the Northwest, when they remained sensitive to the delicate intricacies of
cultural negotiation and commercial exchange with Indians, later in their
careers both men found themselves under pressure to preside over the
dispossession of vast numbers of natives. Although President Thomas
Jefferson had commissioned the Corps to find a water route to the Pacific,
one that would facilitate trade, subsequent policies of the federal govern-
ment aimed to remove Indians from their land, or otherwise deprive them of
the full and unfettered use of it.
Aron challenges what he calls the "feel-good myth of the Lewis and
Clark epic," and provides an account of York's life after the trek. Citing
recently discovered correspondence, Aron shows that, contrary to the myth,
Clark refused to grant York his freedom as a reward for his vital role in the
journey, and instead kept the black man in bondage, forcing him to continue
living apart from his wife. As York grew increasingly resentful, Clark grew
increasingly abusive, beating him and threatening to sell him to another
owner as punishment. Rather than foreshadowing a nation of great toler-
ance and freedom, the posttrek history of Lewis and Clark reveals much
about the hardening of prejudice toward Indians and blacks in the early
nineteenth century, according to Aron. This more accurate version of events
calls into question the historical basis of recent energetic efforts to market a
happy ending to the Lewis and Clark story.
Aron's work reminds us of the significance of memory and memorials-
how and why we reconstruct the past, and the meanings we today attach to
 Introduction 9

past events. In her essay, "'The Dread Void of Uncertainty': Naming the
Dead in the American Civil War," Drew Gilpin Faust examines the problem
of remembering and honoring the dead who have fallen in war.9 In her essay
she illuminates larger questions of citizenship arising from the sacrifices of
American soldiers and their families, northern and southern, in the Civil War.
Faust notes the unprecedented scale of the slaughter-the fact that more
than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives in the conflict, more than all the
American war fatalities from the Revolution to the present combined. This
vast carnage, together with emerging ideas of federal responsibility,
prompted Confederate and U.S. officials alike to develop more systematic
procedures for identifying the dead, recording their names and the circum-
stances of their death, and notifying their families. Before and during much
of the Civil War, these grim tasks were considered to come under the
purview of individual military officers and the comrades of the deceased,
who, on an ad hoc basis and in their own good time, were informally
responsible for contacting the dead man's kin. Yet the huge numbers of Civil
War fatalities, and the fact that in some cases human remains were literally
obliterated by lethal forms of modern warfare, meant that officials would
find the traditional methods of identification and notification unequal to the
task at hand.
By the end of the war, and with the prodding of energetic and determined
reformers such as Clara Barton, the United States had established formal
procedures for accounting for the battlefield fallen. In the process, Faust
argues, Americans began to recognize that the nation was a collection of
affective relationships organized around households and kin networks. By
demonstrating patience and by sacrificing their loved ones to a patriotic
cause, the living too deserved honor and respect from a grateful nation.
Thus the state recognized the rights of mothers and wives to know how and
why a son or brother had died, and where he was buried. This process was
integral to emerging definitions of citizenship and government accountability.
Faust recognizes that the narrative of individual deaths-who died,
where, and under what conditions-carried great significance. It was a
narrative that the parents, wives, and children of fallen soldiers needed to
know, had a right to know. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall also focuses on the power
of stories about the past to inform us about ourselves and about the broader
contours of American history. Hall's essay, which was also her OAH
presidential address in 2004, is titled "The Long Civil Rights Movement
and the Political Uses of the Past." She begins with the premise that embed-
ded within stories, including works of history, lurk potentially dangerous
and divisive truths. lO Today, Americans often look not to professional
historians but to "public story tellers"-political pundits, museum curators,
film directors, and corporate executives-for an understanding of who we
are as a nation, and of ways change can or cannot be effected. It is within
this context that Hall describes what she calls the "dominant narrative" of the
American civil rights movement enshrined in textbooks and in current public
discussions of the successes and failures of modern American politics.
10 Jacqueline Jones

This "dominant narrative," Hall suggests, focuses on Martin Luther

King, Jr., and the activism of other southern black leaders, and begins with
the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision of 1954 and ends with the Civil
Rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Hall suggests that recently, conservative
politicians and ideologues have reinforced this narrative in order to argue
that the civil rights project was a narrow and contained effort led by a few
high-minded men. These conservatives regard the movement as a relatively
limited project that culminated in the passage of federal legislation in the
mid-1960s. The result of this legislation was a newly "color-blind" society
where discussions of racial ideologies and their legacies had no place. Such
"color blindness," Hall charges, provides a license for indifference toward
not only the ongoing struggles of people of color, but also indifference or
contempt toward a longer and deeper campaign that encapsulated the rights
of workers and women as well.
Hall begins her counternarrative in the early twentieth century with the
great migration of black people out of the South, continues the story
through the 1930s with the surge in federal power, and ends it in the 1980s,
with the Reagan devolution of federal power to the states. In the process,
Hall reconfigures the history of the civil rights movement, and encourages
us to consider the way the histories of unions, women's rights organiza-
tions, and civil rights advocacy groups were entwined. This perspective, she
suggests, allows for little of the complacency characteristic of the purveyors
of the "dominant narrative" of civil rights history. In describing the
"long civil rights movement," she sees not triumph and closure, but an
unfinished project on behalf of the struggles of blacks, workers, and people
of color.
In conclusion, the ten essays in this volume are notable for the way that
their interlocking stories provide us with new ways of looking at the past.
Several authors aim to overturn conventional views about the black-white
binary, suggesting that discourses about and practices related to notions of
racial and cultural hierarchy are broader and deeper than a single-minded
focus on African American history might suggest. It is also worth noting
here that most historians integrate into their analysis issues of gender as a
matter of fact-a matter of historical fact-in order to provide a more accu-
rate view of the country's past. Portrayed here are not only women as wives
and mothers, but women as reformers, workers, and as agents of change
on the national and the international scene. Even women's tasks that might
have once been viewed as purely domestic-keeping house and raising
children--can, within contexts as divergent as eighteenth-century
borderlands and twentieth-century Foreign Service households, assume
tremendous political and even international significance. And finally, the
historians represented here understand keenly the power of stories to shape
not only national identity and our vision of the past, but also, at least in
some cases, our priorities for the future. Together these essays reveal the
power of history as a source of enlightenment, entertainment, and enduring
fascination for readers everywhere.
 Introduction II

Notes
Jacqueline Jones is Harry S. Truman Professor of American History at Brandeis
University. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1999-2004), Jones is the author of several
books on labor, the Civil War, and the American South, including Saving Savannah: Civil
Wars in the Georgia Lowcountry, 1854-1872 (forthcoming), Creek Walking: Growing
Up in Delaware in the 1950s (2001), American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White
Labor (1998), The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the
Present (1992), and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the
Family from Slavery to the Present (1985).
1. American Quarterly 57 (September 2005): 677-701.
2. Journal of Women's History 17 (Summer 2005).
3. Technology and Culture 46 (April 2005): 350-73.
4. Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 2005): 157-86.
5. American Literary History (Fall 2005): 438-59.
6. Journal of American History (June 2005): 19-46.
7. Journal of Southern History (August 2005): 621-58.
8. Southern California Quarterly (Spring 2005): 27-46.
9. Southern Cultures (Summer 2005): 7-32.
10. Journal of American History (March 2005): 1233-63.
 Chapter I

From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying

Indian Women in the Borderlands

Juliana Barr

From The Journal ofAmerican History

On July 21, 1774, fray Miguel Santa Marfa y Silva, the leading Franciscan
missionary stationed in the mission district of Los Adaes on the border
between Texas and Louisiana, reported to the Spanish viceroy in Mexico
City on his trip through that region as part of a delegation seeking renewed
peace with powerful Wichita and Caddo nations. In 1769, in the aftermath
of the Seven Years' War, Spain had officially established administrative
control of the former French province of Louisiana, and the mission to
reconfirm Wichita and Caddo alliances sought to represent the new unity of
Spaniards and Frenchmen in Louisiana and Texas. Many, however, could
not put aside past rivalries so easily, and Santa Marfa y Silva was no exception.
Rather than detail this first peace council sought by the Spanish government
with leading Indian nations, the Franciscan spent page after page lamenting
an "infamous traffic of the flesh" he had witnessed being carried on by
Frenchmen living in and among Caddoan Indian villages along the Red
River. To discredit Frenchmen, Santa Marfa y Silva could have deplored the
skyrocketing numbers of enslaved Africans and African Americans in
Louisiana by the 1770s. Or, given the hostile relations between the Spanish
government and many independent and powerful Indian nations in the
lower Plains, the missionary could have bemoaned the fate of Spanish
women and children from New Mexico who had been taken captive by
Indians armed with guns obtained from French traders. Yet, strikingly, the
traffic in humans on which Santa Marfa y Silva chose to focus was one in
Indian women and their children, captured by Indian warriors in the Southern
Plains and Texas and traded east as slaves to French buyers in Louisiana-
women thus consigned to "perdition" by "such cruel captivity," grieved
Santa Marfa y Silva. 1
14 Juliana Barr

Given the growing proliferation of studies of Indian slavery, notably the

works of James F. Brooks and Alan Gallay, the Franciscan's lament seems
not at all surprising. 2 Increasing attention to the enslavement of Indians has
pushed United States historians beyond identifications of North American
slavery as primarily an African American experience and of North
American captivity as primarily a white experience. As Brooks's study of
New Mexico demonstrates, scholars are beginning to focus attention also
on women as the victims of that slave trade. Their scholarship is deepening
understandings of the roles of Indian women in their peoples' interactions
with Europeans. Women often stood in unique positions to learn
languages, to act as translators and emissaries in cross-cultural communi-
cations, and to create ties between cultures. 3 Though scholars have recog-
nized that the conflicting European and native systems of power in which
native women operated constrained the women's opportunities, an emphasis
on women's agency has obscured the more coercive traffics in women that
were equally central to Indian-European relations. In seeking to redeem the
humanity of such women and to recognize their important roles in
trade and diplomacy, scholars have often equated agency with choice,
independent will, or resistance and de-emphasized the powerlessness,
objectification, and suffering that defined the lives of many. Perhaps the
best-known example of this trend in American history and popular culture
is Sacagawea, whose capture at the hands of raiding Hidatsas turned into
enslavement when she was purchased by the French Canadian trader
Toussaint Charbonneau-bondage that continued through her time with
the Lewis and Clark expedition. The violence and coercion that reduced
her to the status of a slave among Euro-Americans has been lost, as popular
preference casts her as Charbonneau's "wife" and a celebrated mediator of
Indian-European diplomacy. 4
The scholarly focus on mediation and accommodation as women's
characteristic activity in Indian-European relations often leads us to over-
look the importance of women in political economies of war and imperial
rivalry. Multiple coercive traffics in women became essential to European-
Indian interaction long before Sacagawea fell into the hands of her captors.
Recognition of the diversity of trafficking not only enriches our under-
standing of the gender dynamics of European-Indian diplomacy and
conflict, but also enables us to move beyond the homogeneous conception
of slavery suggested by using only African American enslavement, specifi-
cally, racial chattel slavery (defined here as a form of property and system of
compulsory labor entailing permanent and hereditary status) to explore
bondage and unfreedom in America. In fact, the very heterogeneity of
Indian bondage suggests comparisons with the range of slave practices in
Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean, and other parts of the world where at
different times and places, persons-primarily women-were held and used
as not only economic, but also as social and political capital. These are
comparisons that resonate with growing scholarly discussions of slavery in
a global perspective. 5
 From Captives to Slaves 15

The confluence of Spanish, French, and Indian peoples in the areas later
known as Comancherfa, Apacherfa, Spanish Texas, and French Louisiana
(figure 1.1) makes them an ideal venue for exploring the forms that traffic
in women might take and the kinds of currency that women might represent
to Indian and European men who exchanged them. Distinct systems of
captivity, bondage, and enslavement developed in a matrix of expanding
Indian territories, French mercantilism, and Spanish defensive needs during
the eighteenth century. At the end of the seventeenth century, steadily
increasing numbers of Spaniards coming north from Mexico and
Frenchmen coming south from Illinois and Canada began to invade the
region and establish neighboring, competing provinces. At the same time,
the territories of bands of Apaches and later Comanches and Wichitas were
shifting to include increasingly large areas of present-day north and north-
central Texas. As those groups converged in the eighteenth century, European
and Indian men-as captors, brokers, and buyers-used captured and
enslaved women to craft relationships of trade and reciprocity with one
another. A key difference between such exchanges and those involving inter-
marriage was that the women whom men captured and enslaved were

• Chihuahua

COAHUILA
Gulf of Mexico
.MEXlCO

.Indian setdement
100 • French or Spanish settlement
I
miles

Figure 1.1 Major Indian, Spanish, and French settlements in Spanish Texas, French
Louisiana, Apacheria, Comaucheria, and the territories of Caddo aud Wichita peoples iu the
mid-eighteenth century.
Source: Organization of American Historians.
16 Juliana Barr

strangers or enemies to their kinship systems. When Indian bands brokered

marital unions in the service of diplomacy, a woman's own family or band
leaders usually negotiated on her behalf, as in the fur trade of Canada, the
Great Lakes region, and the American Southeast. In contrast to such
women, who may have expanded their existing social and economic author-
ity through intermarriage, enslaved Indian women in Texas and Louisiana
remained outside the kin relations of the households that made them objects
of exchange. 6 If efforts to cement diplomatic and economic ties did not
succeed-as often happened between Indians and Spaniards-military and
state officials made punitive war, seeking out captives and hostages in retri-
bution for failed negotiations. Thus hostility as much as accommodation
was the context for the traffic in women. The political and commercial
aspects of the exchanges also set them apart from most Indian practices of
captivity and from European systems of enslavement: Indians did not take
the women to avenge or replace the dead, as they took most captives; nor
did Europeans intend to use them as a servile labor force, as they used most
slaves. Instead, the exchanges interwove the categories of captivity and
slavery and thereby transformed Indian women into valuable commodities
of cross-cultural war, diplomacy, and power.
Writing in 1774, Santa Marfa y Silva demonstrated a certain disingenuous-
ness in focusing only on Frenchmen, since Spaniards had been reducing
select Indians from the region to bondage for much of the eighteenth century.
But that misdirection highlights the way the trade in Indian women may expli-
cate geopolitical relations among European and native powers in colonial
America. In his attempts to accent Spanish-French differences, the Franciscan
downplayed the contentious relations between Spaniards and neighboring
Indians that had made the diplomatic mission to the Wichita and Caddo bands
a necessity in the first place. In such a world, Indian women in the hands of
enemy Indian men became key objects of captive raiding and hostage exchange
as the women's Indian captors sought economic and diplomatic gain with both
native and European allies. In the hands of Spanish and French buyers and
enslavers, women faced fates from sexual servitude, to consignment to labor
camps, to use as political capital in attempts to win or impose alliances or to
signal the failure of those efforts. The multiplicity of experiences reflected not
only differences of culture or race, but also different understandings of how to
govern, how to express power, and how to seek and build political relation-
ships with other men and the nations they represented, whether native or
European. This, then, is the story I would like to explore: the ways Spanish,
French, and Indian men sought to forge or coerce bonds of obligation through
a trade in female pawns. The diverse conditions to which such women were
reduced reveal new ways of understanding bondage and unfreedom.

Our story begins with French-Indian captive trade across the Plains
and along the Texas-Louisiana border. Initial European observations at the
end of the seventeenth century suggest that natives in the Southern Plains and
the Red River valley did not maintain captives as a source of labor. Instead,
 From Captives to Slaves 17

Indian peoples took a few captives in warfare only for ritualized ceremonies
of revenge or, less often, for adoption. Men rarely allowed themselves to be
captured, preferring death on the battlefield; those captured most often
were destined for torture, which furnished the opportunity for the honorable
warrior's death denied them in battle (the honor acquired by enduring pain).
In contrast, captors deemed women and children easier to incorporate into
their communities, though adoption was not always their fate either. An
early French observer, Henri Joutel, a survivor of Rene-Robert Cavelier,
sieur de La Salle's ill-fated expedition of 1684-1687, recorded that during
his visit to Hasinai Caddos in 1687, warriors returned from a battle with
scalps and two captives for victory celebrations. Of the two captives, both
women, one was turned over to Caddo women to be tortured and killed, the
other was scalped but not killed, given a bullet and powder, and sent back
to her people as a warning. Outside the realm of war, exchanges of women
and children more often took a peaceful form, particularly in the service of
diplomatic alliance. Intermarriage often united bands in political and eco-
nomic relationships, such as the Hasinai, Natchitoches, and Kadohadacho
confederacies created by the alliance of various Caddo bands by the end of
the seventeenth century. Children might also be exchanged among Wichita
and Caddoan bands and adopted into their communities as signs of alliance
and insurance of peace. 7
Three years after Joutel's encounters with Caddos, Henri de Tonti and
several other Frenchmen arrived in Caddo lands in search of survivors of
La Salle's expedition, and Kadohadacho warriors tried to persuade the
Frenchmen to accompany them into war against Spaniards to the south-
west of their lands. As enticement, the warriors promised the Frenchmen
any money found, but "as for themselves," Tonti recorded, "they only
wished to take the women and children as slaves." The Frenchmen
declined, trying to make clear that the decision derived from a reluctance
to take Christian captives, since the women and children targeted were in
Spanish settlements. The Caddo men, however, could not be blamed for
presuming French interest in slaves, since the Frenchmen showed no reluc-
tance to trade in enslaved or captive Indians. In fact, Tonti had brought
with him two Kadohadacho women whom he had purchased from
Arkansas Indians at his Illinois trading post on the Mississippi River. The
Frenchman hoped that returning the women to their people would put
him in the Caddos' good graces-and he was right; it did. It may also have
helped establish an image of Frenchmen as purveyors of Indian slaves in
the minds of Caddoan peoples. 8
After the French province of Louisiana was established in 1699, French
officials, following these earlier promising contacts, decided to orient their
trade interests to the west and north. In 1706, the Spanish expedition leader
Juan de Ulibarri reported to New Mexican officials that Wichitas in the
Southern Plains had begun to sell captive Apache women and children to the
French (whom the Wichitas then identified as the "Spanish in the east").
Attempts to find routes to New Mexico put the French in contact with
18 Juliana Barr

Indian bands whose reactions to the French newcomers further signaled

their spreading reputation as slave raiders. In 1719, for instance, when the
French trader Claude-Charles Dutisne first approached a northern Wichita
village in the Plains, warriors twice raised a war club over his head as he
struggled to convince them that he had not come to enslave them. A warn-
ing from neighboring Osages regarding French intentions, he soon learned,
had preceded his arrivaI.9
Dutisne's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the French
presence quickly introduced a commercial element into native captive
taking in the Southern Plains and Red River valley in the early eighteenth
century. The same year he faced death on the Northern Plains, Dutisne
also recorded that a Mento (Wichita) chief had visited him at a new
French post along the Red River to sell Indian slaves (most likely Plains
Apaches). Another French trader, Jean Baptiste La Harpe, reported a mix
of old and new ways of treating captives in Wichita villages he had
visited. At a Tawakoni (Wichita) village on the South Canadian River, a
Wichita chief gave La Harpe an eight-year-old Apache boy in an exchange
of ceremonial gifts and speeches. In the same breath, the chief added that
had La Harpe arrived a month earlier, he could have given (or sold) him
seventeen more Apaches, but, alas, they had been killed in a public
festival. 10
Frenchmen next attempted to open trade with Apaches, the very people
who were losing relatives to French enslavement. In 1724, Etienne de
Bourgmont sent a twenty-two-year-old woman and a teenage boy of sixteen
whom he had purchased from Kansas Indians back to their village among
Plains Apaches. Three months later, he traveled there and tried to build on
this gesture in seeking trade relations with Apache leaders. Standing in the
midst of trade goods he had carefully laid out for display-rifles, sabers,
pickaxes, gunpowder, bullets, red cloth, blue cloth, mirrors, knives, shirts,
scissors, combs, gunflints, vermilion, awls, needles, kettles, bells, beads, brass
wire, and rings-Bourgmont both symbolically and rhetorically made the
case that the Apaches would derive advantage from trade with Frenchmen.
Apache leaders, though, saw quite a different gain to be had and quickly
grabbed the opportunity. "We will go to visit the French, and we will bring
horses to trade with them," an Apache chief first informed Bourgmont. The
next day, as negotiations continued, he neatly and publicly committed the
French to supplying much more than the goods so carefully advertised by
Bourgmont. Standing before more than two hundred warriors and an equal
number of women and children who served as audience to the ceremonial
meetings, the Apache leader announced: "You see here the Frenchman
whom the Great Spirit has sent to our village to make peace with
us .... Henceforth we shall be able to hunt in peace .... They will return to
us our women and children whom they have taken from us and who are
slaves in their country in exchange for horses that we will give them. The
great French chief has promised this to us." But both men's machinations
would be in vainY
 From Captives to Slaves 19

Despite Bourgmont's peaceful intentions and the Apache chief's persuasive

rhetoric, French posts in western Louisiana had already become, and would
remain throughout the eighteenth century, nuclei of a slave trade in Apache
captives brought by Caddos, Wichitas, and later Comanches. Having
identified the numerous and prosperous Caddoan peoples along the Red
River as crucial targets for efforts to establish profitable trade alliances,
Frenchmen had established a military post near a village of Natchitoches
Indians in 1716, naming it Fort St. Jean Baptiste aux Natchitoches. They
built a subsidiary trading post further upriver among Nasonis, another
Caddo band, in 1719 (followed later by posts along the Red River at
Rapides, Avoyelles, Ouachita, Opelousas, and Atakapas). A 1720 report of
the French government addressing the commercial potential of the
Natchitoches post and its hinterlands asserted that the most profitable trade
with Indians there was in slaves, horses, deerskins, and bison hides. In 1726,
Sieur Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville reiterated that, although few
Frenchmen had yet pursued it, "trade would be very good" with Wichita
bands, and he implicitly connected the value of that trade to Wichitas'
prowess as a "truly warlike" people who successfully took many captives
from Apaches. Once Caddo, Wichita, and Comanche warriors had ascer-
tained their own families' safety from French enslavement, they willingly
obliged French desires by trading to them the enemy women and children
they had captured in war.12
The Indian peoples with whom Frenchmen sought trade enjoyed power-
ful positions in the region, and almost all of them used the European pres-
ence to maintain and even strengthen those positions. Caddo, Wichita, and
Comanche willingness to trade war captives to Frenchmen in exchange for
European material goods indicates that the three groups-displaying a
range of socioeconomic systems-did not secure captives with the intention
of keeping them in their own communities for labor or other purposes.
Caddoan peoples maintained three affiliated confederacies, spread thickly
over hundreds of square miles in present-day Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas,
and Oklahoma. The multiple communities in those confederacies
rested economically on steadily intensifying agricultural production and a
far-reaching commercial exchange system, involving trade in hides, salt,
turquoise, copper, marine shells, bows, and pottery with New Mexico, the
Gulf Coast, and the Great Lakes.13 By the end of the seventeenth century,
Wichita-speaking peoples had moved into the lower Southern Plains to
establish fifteen to twenty consolidated, often palisaded villages scattered
across the northern regions of present-day Texas, most in fertile lands along
rivers where they could successfully farm without jeopardizing their defen-
sive capabilities. The trade connections Wichitas then developed over the
first half of the eighteenth century with Frenchmen and Caddos to the east
and newly allied Comanches to the west secured a steady supply of guns and
horses as well as critical alliances needed to defend their populous and pro-
ductive communities against Osage and Apache raids.14 Like Wichitas,
Comanches had moved onto the Southern Plains by the early eighteenth
20 Juliana Barr

century, operating as independent, bison-hunting groups loosely tied to one

another in defensive and economic alliances. IS By mid-century Comanche,
Wichita, and Caddo bands had formed mutually beneficial trade relation-
ships that brought European material goods, Plains hides, and Spanish
horses together for exchange. All three also shared common enemies-
multiple bands of Apaches living in mobile encampments across central
Texas and western New Mexico-and all three took increasing numbers of
Apache captives for trade in Louisiana.
The economic visions of Frenchmen in Louisiana dovetailed with those
of native groups, as the French extended their involvement in the native
trade networks that crisscrossed the Southern Plains and lower Mississippi
Valley. Though plantation agriculture increasingly garnered the attention of
Frenchmen in south and central Louisiana, the Indian hide trade remained
an important component of the province's economy to the end of the
eighteenth century. Thus, a satellite system of trading posts gradually began
to line the western and northern reaches of the French province with a man-
date to establish and maintain the economic and diplomatic relations that
underwrote that trade. The Frenchmen of the outlying posts did not have
the numbers or force to subjugate Indians or dispossess them of their
lands, nor did they wish to. Rather, they sought to establish profitable
exchange, and as a result, they entered into egalitarian relations with domi-
nant Caddo, Wichita, and, by extension, Comanche peoples. Frenchmen
offered European trade goods that the Spaniards in Texas would not, thus
stealing a march on their rivals to the west. French demographic and settle-
ment patterns further contributed to their success as traders. In the
Louisiana hinterlands, French social and familial intermixing with Indians
was widespread, as the French built their trading and military posts in or
near native villages and consequently joined with Indians not only for trade,
but also for subsistence, family building, and daily life. Community ties, in
turn, brought Frenchmen into the heart of Indian political economies and
offered foundations for long-lasting alliances. 16
As such ties developed, bands of Caddos, Wichitas, and Comanches
found female Indian captives to be as valuable as hides and horses in French
markets in Natchitoches and other western Louisiana posts. In exchange,
French trade offered native groups guns and ammunition essential not only
for hunting, but also for defense in the context of increasing competition
and militarization among the region's native peoples. To its Indian
participants, the developing slave trade represented two sides of native con-
ventions of reciprocityY Caddos, Comanches, and Wichitas obtained their
trade goods from a range of sources: the hides from hunting, the horses
from raids on Spanish settlements in Texas, and the captives from warfare
with native enemies (primarily Apaches). One aspect of native conventions
dictated that the three groups took captives only from those they designated
enemies or "strangers" to systems of kinship and political alliance-thus
they took captives only in the context of war. On the flip side, once captive
women became desirable commodities in Louisiana, they also served as
 From Captives to Slaves 21

tools Comanche, Wichita, and Caddo men could use to build trade relations
with Frenchmen. In the eighteenth century, therefore, the French markets
gave new value to an old by-product of warfare.
The trade in women following their capture resulted in more than indi-
vidual benefit or profit, however. Like diplomatic exchanges, the Indian
slave trade brought together men of French and Indian nations in an
exchange that served both utilitarian and prestige purposes. Reciprocal rela-
tions both required and created kinship affiliation. Participation in
exchanges made groups less likely to engage in confrontation and violence
and brought them into metaphorical, if not real, relations of kinship.
Caddo, Comanche, and Wichita men cast trade alliances in terms of fictive
kinship categories of "brotherhood" and male sodalities. The women who
were the objects of the exchange did not create or constitute the tie of
personal or economic obligation. The exchange process itself created rela-
tionships, binding men to each other in the act of giving and receiving.
Practices of intermarriage, adoption, and symbolic kinship relations among
different Indian peoples and among Europeans and Indians meant that
"kinship" expanded to include relations beyond those of only familial
(biological) descent. Economic ties could not be separated from political
ones, and trading partners were also military and political allies. Quite
simply, one did not fight with brothers, just as one did not trade with
enemies. Conversely, the predominance of "Canneci" (Apache) women in
the enslaved Indian population in Louisiana became so pronounced by mid-
century that the governor of Louisiana, Louis Billouart de Kerlerec, identified
it as the primary hindrance to any hope of adding Apache nations to the list
of Louisiana's native trade allies. Since successful trade with some groups
made trade with others impossible, the slave trade put its own limits on
French commercial expansion. 18
Though the relations formed by the trade were between men, the female
sex of the majority of enslaved Indians determined the supply, the demand,
and thus the very existence of the trade network. Women were what
Frenchmen wanted, and women were what Indian warriors had for
exchange. Caddo, Comanche, and Wichita men traded only captive Indian
women and children to Frenchmen (captive men were tortured and killed).
In turn, the French market for female captives was not merely a response to
the availability of such commodities in native societies, but also represented
the needs of soldiers and traders in such French frontier settlements as
Natchitoches. Unlike settlers in the British colonies and New France
(Canada), those in French Louisiana made little systematic attempt to
exploit enslaved Indians as a labor force. Louisiana colonists did hold as
slaves some Indians whom French forces had defeated in wars-notably the
Chitimachas in the 1710s and the Natchez in the 1730s-but such enslave-
ment was an isolated practice belonging to the early period of French
invasion and colonization. As early as 1706, French officials in Louisiana
began lobbying their imperial superiors for permission to trade those Indian
slaves for enslaved African Americans from the West Indies. A 1726
22 Juliana Barr

Louisiana census listed enslaved Africans as outnumbering enslaved

Indians, 1,385 to 159, and the difference continued to expand due to an
ever-increasing African population, especially in the 1780s when the
Spanish government's renewal and legalization of the African slave trade led
to a "re-Africanization" of Louisiana. Yet despite the growth in the enslaved
African population, the number of enslaved Indians held steady, indicating
that the size of the two populations bore little relation to one another. 19
More specifically, even as the importation of African American slave laborers
replaced Indian slaves and the importation of French women made Indian
concubinage and intermarriage unnecessary in regions of Louisiana with a
larger European population, enslaved Indian women remained fixtures of
Indian trade and French family life in outpost settlements in the west. The
minimal use of Indian slaves in the establishment of French plantation
agriculture and the French preference for enslaved African Americans as a
servile labor force indicated that the continuing Indian slave trade held
importance primarily for male domestic demands in the hinterlands of
French settlement.
French settlers and traders by and large came from Canada rather than
France and brought with them a social and cultural heritage of intimate
association with Indian peoples. Intimate unions with women of allied
nations and later with female slaves acquired for sexual exploitation were
thus not new to the Frenchmen who emigrated to Louisiana. Because single
male traders and agents, who often lived among their native trading
partners, originally predominated in the French occupation of Louisiana,
Frenchmen needed to intermarry if they were to have wives and families.
Abbe Guillaume-Thomas-Fran<;ois de Raynal, writing in the 1770s and
looking back over the century, argued that the French had brought to
Louisiana "the custom of living with the savages, which they had adopted
in Canada" and which often involved marrying Indian women with
the "happiest results." "There was never observed the least coolness in the
friendship between these two so diverse nations whom matrimony had
united," Raynal continued, because "they have lived in this intercourse and
reciprocity of mutual good-will, which made up for the vicissitudes of
events brought by the passage of time.,,2o
In this spirit, Frenchmen at posts such as Fort St. Jean Baptiste aux
Natchitoches formed marital unions with their Caddo trading partners and
sexual unions with the captive Apache women who were the objects of
French-Caddo trade. Sexual and marital relations solidified French
relationships with Caddoan peoples as demonstrable acts of permanence
and commitment. The slave trade played a crucial role in supplementing
the female population at Natchitoches throughout the eighteenth century.
French colonial officials linked the Indian slave trade directly with a
"licentious" mode of living that they considered a challenge to the
colonization and development of Louisiana. The French missionary
Fran<;ois Ie Maire bemoaned the trade in "savage female slaves" who,
though reputedly bought to perform domestic services, in actuality became
 From Captives to Slaves 23

concubines. Such practice "had become established usage among the

French at all levels, from governor U~pinay to a company officer, and from
one of Crozat's [trade] agents to a private soldier," according to the histo-
rian Marcel Giraud. Sexual relations between Frenchmen and enslaved
native women further merged commercial and marriage practices. The traffic
in women via the slave trade, like French-Caddo intermarriage, developed
out of the French-Indian trade and settlement nexus and strengthened the
ties of interdependency. The consequent sexual relationships, whether licit or
illicit, became widespread and significant enough to inspire heated
complaints from French imperial and ecclesiastical officials that degeneracy
marked social and familial relations in Louisiana. They helped fuel escalating
demands for greater immigration of Frenchwomen as the eighteenth century
progressed and led to official surveillance of interracial cohabitation and sex-
ual intercourse. Despite such concerns at the imperial and provincial levels of
church and state, however, the number of Apache women among enslaved
populations and in Louisiana households steadily increased as trade net-
works in hides, horses, and captives grew between the French and Caddos
and, through Caddos, extended to Wichitas and Comanches. 21

On the other side of the Texas-Louisiana border, Indian enslavement

exerted quite a different influence on the early invasion and settlement of
the Spanish province of Texas. The advance of the Spanish frontier north-
ward over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into the regions claimed
as the provinces of Nueva Vizcaya, Coahuila, and Nuevo Leon (south of
what became the province of Texas) had brought with it the spread of
European diseases and the intrusion of slave-raiding expeditions seeking
forced labor for Spanish mines and ranches-inexorable forces that
preceded much of the colonization of those regions. Epidemics that began in
the 1550s had, by the 1700s, scythed 90 percent of the native population of
those northern regions of Mexico. Under law, moreover, the Crown might
assign to Spaniards the labor and tribute of a specific Indian community in
an arrangement termed an encomienda. Consequent Spanish demands for
labor on farms and ranches and in mines brought their own brand of anni-
hilation. By 1600, trafficking in enslaved Indians had become an established
way of life in Nuevo Leon. Once the Spaniards there had killed off all the
nearby Indian peoples by congregating them in crowded, unsanitary work
camps where disease or overwork devastated their numbers, they extended
the relentless reach of their slave raids ever northward. A 1672 royal cedula
reiterated the royal prohibitions against the enslavement of Indians-first
expressed in the New Laws in 1542 and reconfirmed in the 1680
Recompilation of the Laws of the Indies-and required their Christian con-
version instead. But the Spaniards in the region merely renamed their
encomiendas, calling them congregaciones (Indian communities nominally
congregated for acculturation and religious instruction) and continued their
raids into the mid-eighteenth century in search of Indian bodies for labor,
not souls for salvation. 22
24 Juliana Barr

Just as Indian groups had done when they encountered the early French
traders on the Plains, Indians in Texas quickly learned what would be of
value to the Spaniards whose expeditions had targeted the region even
before permanent Spanish settlement was attempted in the 1690s. For some
time rumors and evidence had been reaching them that the Europeans from
Mexico and New Mexico were both buyers and actual enslavers of Indians.
Jumanos, who lived in present-day southwest Texas and acted as middlemen
in trade networks linking Caddo groups along the Red River to peoples in
New Mexico and Coahuila, spread news of Spanish slaving practices. Not
surprisingly, when Spaniards first made contact with Caddo peoples along
the Texas-Louisiana border in the 1690s, their reputation as slavers had
apparently preceded them. When Franciscan missionaries asked that a
Hasinai Caddo chief allow his brother, nephew, and two other relatives to
return with the Spaniards to Mexico to receive gifts to bring back to the
chief, the leader feared for their return. He gave permission only after
admonishing fray Damian Mazanet: "Do not permit anyone to demand
service from these men who you take with you, nor to make them work. "23
Others sought their own advantage in Spanish labor systems and thereby
pulled native peoples from the Southern Plains into an increasingly com-
mercialized exchange system to the west in New Mexico. Many eastern
Apache groups, who had been victims of Spanish slave raiding in New
Mexico, began to bring their own captives to New Mexican markets. As
early as the 1650s, the Franciscan missionary Alonso de Posada reported
that in addition to hides and chamois skins, some Apaches now sought "to
sell for horses some Indian men and women, girls and boys" taken from
Wichita bands from the lands of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's fabled
Quivira (the Southern Plains). Such Wichita women and children became
members of a population of detribalized and enslaved Indians known as
genizaros that grew to be a significant element in the New Mexico
settlements. Genizaros aided the expansion and defense of New Mexico's
borders as members of slave militias and frontier communities. 24
To the east, as Spaniards sought a toehold in Texas in the 1710s, they
focused on building a cordon of mission-presidio complexes as bulwark to
protect the silver mines of New Spain's northern provinces against French
aggressors. Having failed to establish settlements among Caddos in the
1690s, Spaniards focused instead on south-central Texas. There remnants
of innumerable Indian bands from south of the Rio Grande had gathered
after fleeing north to escape the reach of both Spanish slave raiding and
European diseases. In south-central Texas they clustered together with kin
and allies and, in the eighteenth century, sought a new form of alliance with
Spaniards through joint settlement in newly established presidio-mission
complexes at San Antonio de Bexar and La Bahia. Throughout the eigh-
teenth century, however, the Spanish government faced serious problems
attracting settlers, soldiers, and native converts to populate colonial centers
so far north. The Spanish population of the Texas province at its height in
1790 was only 3,169. Spanish colonial development also remained rigidly
 From Captives to Slaves 25

hemmed in by far more populous and powerful Indian nations-both

indigenous to the region (such as Caddos) and newly arrived (such as Lipan
Apaches and later Comanches and Wichitas). Spaniards thus found that
even in the limited areas claimed by Spanish settlement, their imperial poli-
cies regarding Indians involved, not imposing rule on others, but defending
themselves against superior native rivals. The resulting weakness of New
Spain's position in the region made it crucial for provincial authorities to
secure peace and alliances with the independent and dominant native
peoples who surrounded them. Yet their efforts would be fraught with
difficulty. The Crown's prohibition against trade with indios barbaros
(independent Indian peoples) shackled local Spaniards' ability to make
diplomatic overtures like those of the French, while the horse herds of mis-
sion, civilian, and presidial settlements attracted native raiders against
whom Spanish forces could offer little defense. Over the eighteenth century,
then, Spaniards struggled to maintain their small foothold in the area
against vying Apache, Caddo, Comanche, and Wichita powers. 25
Of the four native powers, Lipan Apaches were the first to challenge the
Spanish presence in Texas; as a result Spanish-Indian relations there took a
different path than did the relations enjoyed by the French to the east, and
the path led to a different form of bondage-one defined by punitive war.
Though now less well-known than their western relatives, Lipan Apaches
represented a widespread and formidable power throughout the eighteenth
century. Eastern Apaches living in what is now Texas had gained an early
advantage among Indians there with horses acquired in the seventeenth
century through trading and raiding in New Mexico. By the 1740s, "Lipan"
had become the designation used by Spaniards to refer to the easternmost
Plains Apache groups. Their economy centered on hunting and raiding for
bison and horses, which did not allow permanent settlement, though they
did practice semicultivation. Social units farmed and hunted in rancherfas (a
Spanish term for Indian encampments) that might cluster together for
defense and ceremonial ritual. Usually numbering around four hundred
people, such units aggregated ten to thirty extended families related by
blood or marriage that periodically joined together for horse raids, bison
hunts, and coordinated military action. No central leadership existed, and
group leaders made decisions in consultation with extended family
headmen, but unity of language, dress, and customs maintained collective
identity and internal peace. An estimated twelve groups of Lipan Apaches,
each incorporating several rancherfas, lived in central Texas and used horses
to expand their range and control over bison territories and to secure
their individual rancherfas from attack during the agricultural cycles that
alternated with bison hunting over the year. As horses rose in importance,
so too did the raiding that maintained their herds and sustained their
economy.26
Apache economies came under attack in the early eighteenth century,
however, as Comanches and Wichitas migrated south to challenge Apache
bands for the rich bison territories of northern and north-central Texas.
26 Juliana Barr

Hostilities that pitted Apaches against Comanches and Wichitas as well as

the Spaniards quickly erupted, and the treble em battlement gradually
weakened Apaches' defenses, making them increasingly vulnerable to all
three opponents. Apache women and children thus became the focus not
only of raids by Comanche and Wichita warriors seeking captives for
French markets in Louisiana, but also of Spanish military campaigns seek-
ing prisoners whom the Spaniards could use to coerce or punish their
Apache foes. Throughout the 1720s, 1730s, and 1740s, Lipan Apaches
mounted raids on the horse herds of San Antonio de Bexar missions, civilian
ranches, and presidio to sustain a supply of horses crucial to the mobility
and defense of their family bands amid mounting conflicts. In turn, Spanish
fear and frustration escalated when presidial forces proved unable to stop
the warriors' attacks and led to desperate bids by the Spaniards to stem the
raids. Spanish officials, making war to achieve peace, ordered Apache
women and children to be taken captive to force diplomacy, arguing that the
best way to manipulate native groups was through their captive kinsmen or,
more accurately, kinswomen. Sometimes the Spaniards went so far as to sin-
gle out as political hostages the wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of
leading chiefs and warriorsP
Spanish captive policy devastated many Lipan Apache bands by preying
on their women and children (figure 1.2). Indian captive taking involved
small numbers of individuals; Spaniards introduced captive taking on a
scale unimaginable to most Indian nations. To use captives for political
coercion may have seemed a logical tactic to Spanish officials, who could
refer to long traditions of prisoner and hostage exchange in European
warfare. Yet, when Spanish forces attacked Apache rancherfas, took cap-
tives, and then tried to force peace with the bands they had attacked, they
sought to forge alliance through an act of hostility. Moreover, even by
Spanish terms of hostage exchange, their captive policy was fundamentally
unequal because it never represented an exchange of Indian women for
Spanish women. Unlike the Comanche warriors in New Mexico who took
Spanish women and children as well as horses as the booty of their raids,
Apache men in Texas focused their raiding on horse herds. 28
Not surprisingly, Spanish actions brought only more hostilities with
Apaches. For the Apache women and children held prisoner in San Antonio
de Bexar, the situation worsened. As captivities lengthened from months
into years, officials distributed the Apache women and children as "servants"
among soldiers and civilians in Texas and other provinces to the south.
Spaniards, who had for long found ways around the crown's legal prohibi-
tions against the enslavement of Indians, now rationalized their decision to
keep such women and children in bondage by claiming the necessities of
defense. By sleight of interpretation, they deemed the only cautivos in New
Spain's northern provinces to be Spaniards captured by Indians-
Apache women and children captured by Spanish forces were prisioneros
(prisoners of war). Critics, however, clearly saw that officials and civilians
alike sought profit rather than peace through such enslavement. Fray Benito
 From Captives to Slaves 27

Figure 1.2 Lipan Apache Indians North of the Rio Grande, ca. 1834-1836. Watercolor by
Lino Sanchez y Tapia after the original sketch by Jose Maria Sanchez y Tapia. Lipan Apaches
were the main victims of both punitive Spanish policies and the ready market for enslaved
Indians in French Louisiana.
Source: Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Fernandez de Santa Ana, for instance, argued in 1740 that raids against
Apache rancherias only increased Apache hatred; it was "ridiculous" that
soldiers and citizens pledged to serve the king instead sought their own gain
through the "capture of horses, hides, and Indian men and women to serve
them." He concluded that with such vile intentions, their actions would
result in an equally vile outcome. 29
Some of the Apache women distributed by Spanish authorities may have
remained as slaves in Spanish communities and households, but unlike
Indian women in French trading posts, they were not often involved in inti-
mate unions with their captors. Although, like the French in Louisiana,
Spaniards needed to increase their settler population, there is no indication
that they intermarried with either the native peoples they sought as allies
or the native captives whom they manipulated in the service of peace.
Intermarriage with Indians was not uncommon in Spanish America, but by
the eighteenth century it was no longer used as a means of diplomacy and
alliance with independent Indian nations. Rather, Spanish-Indian sexual
relations and intermarriage took place only within Spanish society, involving
28 Juliana Barr

Indian individuals who had been incorporated into that society as subjects
of the Spanish church and state. Some of the enslaved Apache women may
have become the consorts of Spaniards or of mission Indians in the lower
ranks of Spanish communities. Yet in contrast to the large genizaro popula-
tion that grew steadily in New Mexico, the women and children held in
bondage in Texas were few, and as warfare with Apache peoples increased
across the northern provinces over the eighteenth century, they were likely
to be deported to Mexico City and later the Caribbean. 3D
The experiences of Apache family bands targeted by Spanish military
policy are illustrated most poignantly by the story of one headed by the chief
Cabellos Colorados. In 1737, accompanied by eight men and eight women,
he approached San Antonio, seeking trade with Spanish residents there. The
equal number of men and women in the party suggested their peaceful
intent. Yet to find Apaches close to town just when Spanish forces were
looking for someone to nab for past horse raids and when Spanish officials
were seeking to reestablish the effectiveness of their arms in the eyes of a
desperate citizenry and doubting viceregal authorities was too providential
an opportunity to pass up. When twenty-eight armed soldiers rode out,
Cabellos Colorados and his men were clearly not expecting a fight and did
not put up a defense; they were therefore quickly surrounded and captured.
In further indication that the Spaniards had no evidence to prove the group
were raiders, they insisted on hearings to gather such evidence-something
they had never felt necessary before. 31
In June 1738, Prudencio de Orobio y Bazterra, the governor of Texas,
thus proceeded to gather testimony on the "infidelity" of Apaches in violat-
ing a 1733 peace treaty that did not exist, and Cabellos Colorados and his
people were the designated subjects of the frame-up. The "evidence" against
them amounted to assertions based only on coincidence, rumor, and prejudice.
First, the Spaniards saw it as suspicious that, of the known Apache
rancherfas, that of Cabellos Colorados and his people was the closest to San
Antonio. Second, soldiers testified that no "assaults" had taken place since
their capture, so the raiders must be the ones in jail. Third, the presidial
commander Jose de Urrutia identified Cabellos Colorados as a man of
standing and reputation among Apaches-so much so that Urrutia claimed
it was rumored that the leader had bragged to the capitane grande of the
Apache nation (a position that did not exist) that he would raid all the
presidial horse herds of San Antonio, Coahuila, San Juan Bautista, and
Sacramento (quite a task for one man), then slaughter all the inhabitants
(a war tactic that did not exist among Apaches). Clearly, Cabellos
Colorados was a powerful man whose downfall might powerfully enhance
the reputation of the Spaniard who brought him down. 32
In the meantime, Cabellos Colorados tried to negotiate with his
captors, relying on female hostages as mediators by requesting that the
Spaniards allow one of the women to return to his rancherfa to get horses
with which to buy their freedom. Between the December capture and the
June hearings, Apache women traveled back and forth between Apache
 From Captives to Slaves 29

and Spanish settlements, trying to exchange horses for the captives, but an
attack on their rancherfa by Caddos who killed twelve men, captured two
boys, and stole all their horses severely limited their ability to produce
enough horses to appease Spanish officials. Instead, the women brought
bison meat for their captive kinsmen and bison hides as goodwill gifts for
Spanish officials. In August, an elderly man accompanied the women and
brought news that, though they could not supply any horses, he had
visited all the Apache bands and asked them to stop all raids, and he now
offered this peace agreement to the officials in exchange for the captives.
The governor refused. The elderly man then tried to exchange a horse and
a mule for his elderly wife, who was among the captives. The governor
refused again. 33
No peace offering could offset the desire of the Spaniards to punish
someone for the deeds of Apache raiders who had made a mockery of their
presidial forces in the preceding years. Ultimately, Orobio consigned
Cabellos Colorados and his entire family to exile and enslavement. In his
order of February 16, 1739, the governor refused to spare the women or
even an infant girl, declaring that "the thirteen Indian men and women
prisoners in the said presidio, [shall be taken] tied to each other, from juris-
diction to jurisdiction, to the prison of the capital in Mexico City, and that
the two-year-old daughter of chief Cabellos Colora dos, Marfa Guadalupe,
shall be treated in the same manner." The col/era of Apache prisoners-
seven men, six women, and one child-left on February 18 escorted by a
mixed guard of soldiers and civilians. 34
They traveled for 102 days on foot-the men shackled each night in leg
irons, stocks, manacles, or ropes-before reaching Mexico City in late May
where they were incarcerated in the viceregal prison, Real Carcel de la Corte
(the Acordada). Two of the fourteen died en route to Mexico City, and less
than six months later, seven more succumbed in the disease-ridden prison or
in workhouses. Whether any of the other five survived is unknown; the last
records indicate that prison officials sent two men to a hospital while
consigning two women, although very ill, to servitude in private homes of
prominent Spaniards. The last of the five, little Marfa Guadalupe, was
separated from her mother (one of the two sent into servitude), and later
efforts to return her to her mother failed when the appointed guardian
absconded with the wife of Cabellos Colorados. They would not be the last
Apaches to suffer such a horror-filled fate. 35
Having proclaimed defensive needs as their carte blanche for wartime
enslavements, militia groups made up of soldiers and civilians devastated
Apache family bands, causing repeated loss of kinswomen and children, and
nearly brought on their own destruction at the hands of infuriated Apache
leaders and warriors until a peace treaty in 1749 ended hostilities for twenty
years. During those twenty years, Apache leaders would strive without
success to regain family members lost in the 1730s and 1740s. By the 1760s,
intensifying Comanche and Wichita pressures on both Apaches and
Spaniards brought their brief experiment with peace to an end. By then,
30 Juliana Barr

Spanish officials had decided to ditch Apaches as allies, preferring their

more powerful Comanche and Wichita enemies. 36

It is at this point, in the late 1760s, that our two stories (and the two slave
networks) come together. French trade relations with powerful Caddo,
Wichita, and Comanche bands-relations underwritten by the traffic in
women-had been all too clear to watchful Spanish eyes since the beginning
of the century. For as long as French traders had been operating in the region,
Spanish missionaries and military officials in Texas had been trying to effect
alliances of their own in the hope of offsetting the influence of their French
rivals. Throughout the first half of the century, however, such efforts had met
with abject failure even as the Spaniards watched Indian-French ties steadily
strengthen. 3? Reports filtered in from all across the Plains and New Mexico
detailing how Frenchmen had expanded their native alliances and their slave
trade. 38 Imperial Spanish officials feared that growing trade relations sig-
naled military alliance and the potential for a united French-Indian attack on
Spanish territories. Such laments remained focal points of Spanish rhetoric as
they watched first Caddos, then Comanches and Wichitas, build economic
ties to the French colony. The ever-increasing military power of Comanche
and Wichita nations soon became far more daunting than that of the French,
however. The armaments acquired through French trade had equipped
Comanche and Wichita bands better for the raids that from the 1740s on
plundered Spanish horse herds in civil and mission settlements in both Texas
and New Mexico. By 1758, officials in Mexico City even feared Comanche
invasion of the Spanish provinces south of the Rio Grande. 39
Yet without the finances to offer competitive trade of their own or the
military power to stop French-Indian alliances by force, the Spaniards in
Texas found they could do little to offset French advantage. It was not
until the 1760s that the cession of Louisiana from French to Spanish rule
following the Seven Years' War opened up new possibilities for Spanish
officials. Spanish law officially prohibited the enslavement and sale of
Indians, and Alejandro O'Reilly, then serving as governor of Louisiana,
extended that prohibition to the province with the formal assumption of
Spanish power in 1769. Spanish officials saw an opportunity to cut off the
trade that put guns into the hands of native groups deemed "hostile" to the
Spanish government. Local imperatives ensured the enforcement of the ban
in the Red River valley along the Texas-Louisiana border, particularly
among Wichitas and Comanches. Spanish officials finally had the means to
sever the commercial ties that had allied native bands in Texas and the
Southern Plains with Frenchmen. Thus in response to O'Reilly's edict,
officials in Natchitoches forbade the trade in horses, mules, and slaves from
those Indian nations, and they recalled from their subposts or homes among
"hostile" Indians all licensed traders, hunters, and illicit "vagabonds"-
many of whom the Natchitoches commander Athanase de Mezieres
described in 1770 as men "who pass their scandalous lives in public concu-
binage with the captive Indian women whom for this purpose they purchase
 From Captives to Slaves 3I

among the heathen, loaning those of whom they tire to others of less power,
that they may labor in their service, giving them no other wage than the
promise of quieting their lascivious passion. "40
Once at Natchitoches, the traders and hunters had to answer questions
about their native trade relationships and to register their Indian slaves. In
fear of losing their slaves, some Frenchmen sought to secure the women by
whatever means possible. Though government officials recognized provi-
sional ownership pending a royal decision on the status of enslaved Indians
in the province, some men clearly chose not to let their fate rest on the
vagaries of a royal decree. Many married their slaves or promised freedom if
the women swore to remain with them as servants or consorts. Intimate rela-
tions thereby became a means of prolonging women's servitude. Fran~ois
Morvant, for instance, in 1770 declared his ownership of a twenty-five-
year-old Apache woman named Marie Anne as well as their son, age twelve.
Sometime thereafter, however, her status was transformed, as she was
enumerated as Morvant's wife, "Ana Maria, of Apache nationality," in later
Spanish censuses for the nearby settlement of Nacogdoches, Texas.
Tellingly, though their relationship had existed for at least thirteen years, it
was not until Morvant faced losing ownership of her that he married Marie
Anne. By 1805 they had three more sons, a daughter, and one grandson
living with them. Similarly, in 1774 Jacque Ridde freed an eighteen-year-old
Apache girl, Angelique, whose ownership he claimed, but only after she
pledged to remain in his service, and Pierre Raimond married Fran~oise,
another Apache woman, following her manumission. 41
Governing officials in Spain never ruled on the status of Indian slaves,
and the extension of Spanish law into Louisiana freed no enslaved Indians
except for a very few whose owners voluntarily manumitted them in the
aftermath of O'Reilly's edict in 1769 or in 1787 when the ordinance was
republished in response to a legal case involving runaway Indian slaves in
St. Louis. The existence of a law tells us very little about whether the law
was enforced or obeyed-and the reiteration of legal prohibitions suggests a
lack of compliance. Between 1790 and 1794, a handful of slaves also sued
successfully for manumission in Spanish courts on the grounds of Indian
identity (their own or that of their mothers), but all those cases were heard
in New Orleans, and such legal opportunities did not exist for enslaved
Indian women or their children in outpost settlements far from urban
centers, such as Natchitoches. In the wake of the slave uprising in Saint
Domingue in 1791, such opportunities quickly disappeared for all, as
Spanish officials decided that any challenges to the slave system were
dangerous. 42
Meanwhile, reports from Natchitoches indicate that despite the new
trade prohibitions on the books, the slave traffic along the Texas-Louisiana
border kept up a steady, if illicit, flow of women from west to east on the
ground. As late as the 1780s, peltries (primarily deerskins) still made up a
significant portion of Louisiana's exports, indicating the continued importance
of Indian trade and the extensive network of trading posts that supported
32 Juliana Barr

European-Indian exchange. Marriage and baptism records in Natchitoches

were testament to the continued role of enslaved Apache women as
consorts, wives, and mothers through the end of the eighteenth century.
Maria Modesta, the "natural" daughter of Marie Magdalena, an Apache
slave of Jean Louis Ie Court, grew up to marry Jean Laurent Bodin and have
a son, while Therese Lecompte, the natural daughter of an enslaved Apache
woman also named Therese, married Louis Metoyer, a free man of color.
Another Apache woman named Marie Rosalie married Louis Guillori, an
Opelousa Indian. The unions of the two Louises indicate that French traders
were not the only men in the market for Indian wives. Unlike the black
population in urban New Orleans, the black residents of Natchitoches, both
slave and free, were predominantly male, leaving them with fewer potential
consorts among enslaved or free women-a demographic factor that may
have encouraged their intermarriage with Indian women. Official censuses
only hinted at the numbers, and sacramental records-listing almost two
hundred enslaved Indian women and children in the Natchitoches area over
the century-also offer only a partial accounting. Nevertheless, by 1803
almost one-quarter of the native-born European population in northwest
Louisiana counted Indian slaves in their ancestry, and 60 percent of that num-
ber claimed descent directly from an enslaved Indian parent or grandparent. 43
In 1806, an Anglo-American report discussing the still-prevalent Apache
women who had been "brought to Natchitoches, and sold amongst the French
inhabitants, at forty or fifty dollars a head," concluded that the women had
become "servants in good families, and taught spinning, sewing, &c. as well
as managing household affairs, married natives of the country [Frenchmen
and mitis], and became respectable, well behaved women; and have now,
grown up, decent families of children, have a language peculiar to them-
selves, and are understood by signs by all others.,,44 Most enslaved women,
however, appear in records only as the subjects of baptism at the behest of
their French owners or as mothers of natural children whose fathers usually,
but not always, went unnamed in sacramental registers. Thus the lives of
most enslaved Indian women rested on the whims of their owners, and a
woman might find her world turned suddenly upside down if she were used
to pay medical bills, exchanged for horses, seized for debt, or enumerated in
a will.4s The experiences of these women began in war, when they were torn
from their communities by brutal force, and culminated in their sale into
sexual and labor relations defined by coercion.
It was in response to such stories that fray Santa Marfa y Silva had issued
his denunciation of French traders after the Indian slave trade into
Louisiana had become illicit in the 1770s. Yet, even Santa Marfa y Silva, if
pressed, would have needed to acknowledge that as Spanish officials in
Texas sought to stem the eastward flow of captive Indian women into
Louisiana, they created in its stead a more deadly southward flow of
hostages into Mexican prisons and labor camps.46 Though French traders
associated with the Natchitoches and Arkansas posts remained active
covertly and British traders soon began pushing into the region, Comanche
 From Captives to Slaves 33

and Wichita economies were hindered. The need to diversify their trade
contacts more and more turned Indian eyes to the Spaniards in Texas.
Though Comanches and Wichitas continued their raids on Spanish settle-
ments in Texas to maintain their horse supply, the challenge of picking up
the slack in arms and material goods formerly provided by Louisiana mar-
kets remained. To solve this problem, they found new ways to benefit from
an exchange of women, selling war captives to the Spaniards for horses and
goods that Spanish officials preferred to term "ransom" and "redemption"
payments. The new diplomatic traffic would put even more Apache women
and children into Spanish bondage. Yet, it took years before economic
exchange completely replaced battlefield violence among Spaniards,
Wichitas, and Comanches.
During the transitional period of alternating war and diplomacy,
Comanche and Wichita men at first took advantage of Spanish diplomatic
needs to pursue personal rather than commercial ends. The tales of two
Indian couples, one Wichita and one Comanche, illustrate the twists and
turns that newly emerging captive exchanges might take in Spanish-Indian
relations. Both stories unfolded over the spring and summer of 1772. That
spring word reached a principal chief of a Taovaya (Wichita) band that his
wife-who had been taken from him by Apache raiders-had been sold by
her captors to a Spaniard in Coahuila. As the chief was soon to travel to San
Antonio de Bexar as part of a diplomatic party sent to ratify the first treaty
between Wichitas and the Spanish government, he recognized that Spanish
officials' desperation for peace could be the means of saving his wife in
circumstances where he himself could not. As soon as the chief reached San
Antonio that summer, he explained his plight to the Spanish governor, Juan
Marfa de Ripperd:i. "She is so much esteemed by him," Ripperd:i reported
to the viceroy, "that he assures me that she is the only one he has ever had,
or wishes to have until he dies, and, as she leaves him two little orphans, he
begs for her as zealously as he considers her delivery [return] difficult."47
The governor quickly grasped that the fate of the captive woman would
determine the fate of the newly completed peace treaty and promised the
Taovaya chief he would use the "strongest means" to secure her. If he failed
to grant the chief's request for help, Ripperd:i warned the viceroy, "all that
we have attained and which is of so much importance, would be lost." Thus
it was with exultation that Ripperd:i wrote to the viceroy a month later,
assuring his superior that, in answer to his urgent requests, the governor of
Coahuila had found and returned the chief's wife. Indeed, Ripperd:i had
orchestrated her delivery to his own home in San Antonio where she was to
be turned over to her husband (surely to convince the Taovaya chief that it
was the Texas official to whom he was beholden for his wife's return).
Optimistically, the governor reiterated "that she may be the key that shall
open the way to our treaties." In March 1773, Ripperd:i finally concluded
his private captive exchange, writing to the viceroy that the happy husband
and a delegation of Taovayas were in Ripperda's home and the Taovaya
couple had been reunited. 48
34 Juliana Barr

The governor might well choose to dwell on that auspicious moment,

because his negotiation of a similar situation with Comanches had taken a
far rockier, less promising path. In fact, Ripperda very nearly bungled the
whole thing. The second story began in February 1772 when a detachment
from the Bexar presidio returned to the town of San Antonio with an unex-
pected prize-not Apache but Comanche captives-three women and one
girl. Ripperda already had three other Comanche women, captured months
before, who had been held so long in one of the San Antonio missions that
all three had been baptized and two married off to mission neophytes.
Because of their baptisms, those three could not be returned to live among
their people in what Spaniards considered apostasy, but the four new cap-
tives provided the governor an opening for diplomatic overtures to
Comanche leaders. Since the Spanish government had recently completed
new peace agreements with bands of Taovayas and Caddos, he hoped
he might likewise attract (or coerce) Comanches to the negotiating table for
the first time. Ripperda therefore sent two of the women back to their
village under military escort, carrying goodwill gifts to present to their chief,
Evea, while he kept the other woman and little girl as hostages to draw the
chief to San Antonio. 49
A month later, Evea sent a response to San Antonio in the form of emis-
saries led by a woman carrying a cross and a white flag. The woman at the
head of the party was one of the female captives freed by Ripperda and was
also the mother of the little girl still held hostage. Others in the party
included the hostage girl's father, the husband of the other hostage woman
held by the governor, and the brother of two of the three Comanche
women held in the missions. The governor's gambit had not drawn out the
chief, but he certainly had attracted a diverse group seeking to recover lost
family members. Initially, meetings went well as the Comanche visitors
reunited with Ripperda's two hostages and exchanged diplomatic courtesies
with the governor. As they departed, however, they sought retribution for
their troubles by taking four hundred horses from the Bexar presidial herd.
They also tried to liberate the three other Comanche women held in the mis-
sion, but Spanish soldiers thwarted that rescue operation. In despair at her
failed escape, one of the women from the mission tried to kill herself upon
recapture by the Spaniards. Unfortunately for the Comanche party, they too
failed in their getaway. A group of Apache warriors attacked the party as it
fled the region, killed seven men, captured half the horses and four of the
women, and promptly turned them over to the Spaniards. Ripperda,
angered at what he labeled the Comanches' "treachery" for using women to
feign peace, consigned all the women to different forms of bondage in
Coahuila. The three miss ionized Comanche women were destined for
Coahuila missions, accompanied by their neophyte husbands, while the
others went to labor camps.50
Comanche leaders, however, did not give up, and in the summer of 1772,
they traveled to San Antonio (this time in the company of Wichita allies) to
retrieve the women now even farther from their reach, in Coahuila.
 From Captives to Slaves 35

Chief Evea himself joined the conference. Following ceremonies reaffirming

peace agreements with Wichita bands, Ripperda attempted to shame the
Comanche men by displaying the "false" white flag of truce carried earlier by
the Comanche woman. Though he claimed to the viceroy to have sent the
Comanches away empty-handed, the men he confronted-including the
husband of one captive woman-ultimately had the advantage; the governor
could not risk offending representatives of such a powerful Indian nation.
Tellingly, in the same letter in which he bragged of cowing Evea with the
false flag, Ripperda reported that he had advised the governor of Coahuila
to ensure that the Comanche woman was not baptized, so that she could be
returned to her husband. Records fail to tell whether she was. If she was
redeemed, it did not buy the Spaniards peace for long, since hostilities
continued unchecked until 1785 when the two peoples signed their first
peace treaty. The position of power enjoyed by Comanches and Wichitas
stood in stark contrast to that of Apaches, as the Comanche and Wichita
women who fell prey to Spanish bondage were few and Comanche and
Wichita men more easily regained those who did. 51
Spanish officials increasingly chose to negotiate truce and alliance with
Comanche and Wichita warriors by ransoming from them any enemy cap-
tives they took in war. In the process, the Spaniards also attained for them-
selves, by commercial rather than violent means, captive Indian women to
use in diplomatic relations with the women's families and peoples. Most
commonly, they purchased Apache captives from Comanche and Wichita
men. Native captive raiding may have risen in response to Spanish attempts
to broker deals with family members of the victims. Fray Juan Domingo
Arricivita asserted that while Apaches might take captives in war to sell to
other nations, they equally took them "to exchange them for some of their
relatives who have been made prisoners."s2 Spanish diplomatic traffic in
women was not limited to transactions with Comanches and Wichitas. For
instance, when eighty Apache warriors led by seven chiefs captured a
woman, one girl, and two boys in a revenge raid on a Tonkawa rancherfa in
1779, Texas governor Domingo Cabello offered eight horses for the cap-
tives. He claimed to want the children because they "could become
Christians by virtue of their youth," but his desire for the woman was
purely political, since she could be restored to the Tonkawa band as "proof
of friendship." Interestingly, the Apache men refused to give him any of the
captives, not because eight horses was an unfair price, but because they saw
little political gain to be had from the Spanish governor at that time. Further
proof of the Apache men's careful assessment of where their interests lay
came when chief El Joyoso chose instead to give one of the children, a ten-
year-old Mayeye girl, to his "good friend Don Luis Menchaca," a Spanish
merchant in San Antonio who had long traded with Apache peoples
and shown them good faith (sometimes against the wishes of the provincial
government) .53
Caddos and Wichitas also found remuneration by ransoming Spanish
women whom they had acquired from Comanches who had captured them
36 Juliana Barr

in New Mexico. The payment received by Taovayas (Wichitas) from the

trader Jose Guillermo Esperanza for a New Mexican woman, Ana Maria
Baca, and her six-year-old son spoke to the possible profits. For Ana Maria
Baca, Taovayas received "three muskets, three netted cloths, two blankets,
four axes, three hoes, two castetes with pipe, one pound of vermilion, two
pounds of beads, ten knives, twenty-five gunflints, eight steels for striking
flints, six ramrods, six awls, four fathoms of wool sash, and three hundred
bullets with necessary powder." For Baca's son, Esperanza gave Taovayas
"one otter hide, one hundred bullets with necessary powder, one ax, three
castetes with pipe, one and one-half quarter pounds of vermilion, one net-
ted cloth, one blanket, and one musket." Notably, in this exchange
Taovayas were not the only ones who planned to profit from Ana Marfa
Baca's captivity. The Nacogdoches lieutenant Christobel Hilario de
Cordoba, to whom Esperanza had related his purchase, reported with out-
rage that Esperanza went on to say that he planned to take the woman and
sell her in Natchitoches "where there could not but be plenty of Frenchmen
to purchase her and bother her, as is their custom, since she still is attractive."
Cordoba forestalled the woman's sale into concubinage by taking her and
her son into protective custody. Cordoba's intervention (which Spanish
officials vehemently supported) made clear how aberrant it was that Ana
Marfa Baca's Spanish identity had not excluded her from the category of
women whom Esperanza felt he might acceptably sell into the sex tradeY
Although Spanish officials spent much time bemoaning the loss of
Spanish women to Indian captivity, the charge remained rhetorical in
eighteenth-century Texas. Spanish captives were few in number, and the
new Spanish-Indian traffic in "redeemed" captives remained primarily one
of Indian women. The rhetoric about Spanish female captives in Indian
hands was meant to appeal to government superiors in Mexico and thereby
to gain more military men and supplies with which to defend the province
against indomitable Comanche and Wichita forces, but that tactic often
failed. In response to complaints from the commandant of the Interior
Provinces that Texas officials had failed to contribute to the alms that
Spanish law demanded all settlements in the provinces collect for the
ransoming of Christian captives held by Indians, Cabello explained that no
captives from Texas had been taken and thus little local imperative to give
to such a fund existed in Texas. 55 In Texas, then, fictitious Spanish women
were objects of persuasion and real Indian women were the objects
of exchange-whether in French trade markets or in Spanish diplomatic
negotiations.
The gradual stabilization of relations among Spaniards, Comanches,
and Wichitas in the waning years of the century meant only ill for Apaches,
as the maintenance of the three groups' peace agreements often involved the
enslavement of Apaches still deemed enemies by them all. Whether captured
by Spanish presidial forces or ransomed to them by Comanche or Wichita
warriors in diplomatic exchange, Apache women and children continued
to fall victim to punitive Spanish policies that sent younger children to
 From Captives to Slaves 37

missions for conversion and all others to labor camps or prisons in Mexico
City and, beginning in the 1780s, in the Caribbean. Many died in transit to
Mexico. Most never saw their homes again. Despite the impossibility of
return, back home their husbands and fathers received promises of the
women's return if they agreed to treaty negotiations. Thus when, in one
instance, Apache men arrived at a meeting site and did not find their wives
among the women brought for exchange, officials responded by offering them
their pick of other women captured elsewhere. For those Spanish officers,
Apache women had become so commodified that they were interchangeable.
Spanish records rarely detail the suffering of women themselves, but a handful
of incidents give mute testimony to it, and none more powerfully than the sto-
ries of women who tried to take their own lives rather than remain captive.
The Comanche woman who tried to kill herself upon recapture after she
escaped from the San Antonio mission in 1772 was not alone in preferring
death to enslavement. Jean Louis Berlandier recorded that another Comanche
woman captured early in the nineteenth century "asked for a knife to remove
a thorn she said was hurting her foot, but when they gave it to her she plunged
it into her heart." The fate of these captive and enslaved Indian women
signified irremediable moments of Spanish-Indian interchange in eighteenth-
century Texas. Theirs is the story that remains to be written. 56

Beyond telling of warfare and its spoils, the stories of enslaved Apache
women and children document the ways European and Indian men used
them as social and political capital in efforts to coerce and accommodate
one another. Looking at how bands and empires or traders and diplomats
transformed women into currency allows one to see multiple sources and
forms of bondage: from pre-Columbian indigenous warfare that created
captivity as an alternative to battlefield deaths, to captive raiding and com-
mercial trade that created human commodities, to hostage taking and
deportation that created prison labor. Pressed into service, women became
objects for sex, familial reproduction, and reciprocal trade relations; gifts
that made peaceful coexistence possible for their captors; or victims who
paid the price for their captors' hostility. This diversity of slaveries unfolded
from the confrontations and collusions of European and native political
systems that structured economic behavior, battlefield enmity, and diplomatic
maneuvering. Putting standardized categories of slavery and unfreedom to
the test in complicated borderlands where two imperial powers sought to
negotiate multiple configurations of Indian social and political organization
show how wanting those categories can be. Slavery in North America has
been cast as a monolithic, chattel-oriented system of coerced labor, thus
making it a distinctive and anomalous model when compared with forms of
bondage instituted in other times and places. Meanwhile the forms of
captivity and exchanges of women involved in European-Indian relations in
the Americas have fallen into categories often perceived to be more benign. If
bondage could prove such an infinitely variable institution in just one region
of colonial North America, imagine what we may find as we piece together
38 Juliana Barr

experiences across the entire continent. Explicating such diversity will bring
American practices of slavery into better global perspective and more
fruitful comparison with colonial geopolitics and cultural geographies
around the world.

Notes
Juliana Barr is an assistant professor at the University of Florida. She wishes to thank
Sean P. Adams, Jeanne Boydston, James F. Brooks, Indrani Chatterjee, Laura F. Edwards,
Alan Gallay, Ramon A. Gutierrez, Nancy A. Hewitt, Joseph c. Miller, Jennifer M. Spear,
David J. Weber, the participants in the 2002 Avignon Conference on Forced Labour and
Slavery, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of American History for their
valuable comments on earlier drafts of the essay.
Readers may contact Barr at jbarr@history.ufl.edu.
1. Fray Miguel Santa Marfa y Silva to Viceroy Antonio Bucareli y Ursua, July 21, 1774,
in Athanase de Mizieres and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1768-1780, trans. and
ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton, 2 vols. (Cleveland, OH, 1914),2: 74-75.
2. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the
Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave
Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven,
CT, 2002); Russell M. Magnaghi, Indian Slavery, Labor, Evangelization, and
Captivity in the Americas: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD, 1998).
Recent conference programs of historical organizations (notably the Omohundro
Institute of Early American History and Culture) indicate that numerous studies,
particularly dissertations, of Indian slavery across colonial North America are in
the works. For a recently completed example, see Brett H. Rushforth, "Savage
Bonds: Indian Slavery and Alliance in New France" (PhD diss., University of
California, Davis, 2003).
3. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter
in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, MA, 2001); Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in
Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver, 1980); Jacqueline
Peterson, "The People In Between: Indian-White Marriage and the Genesis of a Metis
Society and Culture in the Great Lakes Region, 1680-1830" (PhD diss., University of
Illinois, Chicago, 1981); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade
Society, 1670-1870 (Norman, OK, 1980); Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of
Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women (New York, 1995); Tanis C.
Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower
Missouri (Columbia, 1996); Greg O'Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age,
1750-1830 (Lincoln, NE, 2002); Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and
Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln, NE, 1998).
4. On historians' definitions and uses of agency, particularly in relationship to slavery,
see Walter Johnson, "On Agency," Journal of Social History 37 (Fall 2003): 113-24.
On the limits of agency for women caught in the exchanges of men, see Brooks,
Captives and Cousins; and Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and
Culture in Old California (Albuquerque, NM, 1999). On Sacagawea's experience
with the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as her escape from slavery and her life
afterward-lost to history by past tendencies to cast her as a tragic heroine who died
young-see Thomas P. Slaughter, Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and
Wilderness (New York, 2003), 86-113. On the mythologizing of Sacagawea, see
Donna Barbie, "Sacajawea: The Making of a Myth," in Sifters: Native American
Women's Lives, ed. Theda Perdue (New York, 2001),60-76.
 From Captives to Slaves 39

5. Igor Kopytoff, "Slavery," Annual Review of Anthropology 11 (1982): 207-30;

Joseph c. Miller, "The Problem of Slavery as History," inaugural lecture of the David
Brion Davis Lecture Series at the Gilder-Lehrman Center, Yale University, February 7,
2005 (in Joseph c. Miller's possession); James L. Watson, "Slavery as an Institution:
Open and Closed Systems," in Asian and African Systems of Slavery, ed. James L.
Watson (Oxford, 1980), 1-15. Historical and anthropological discussion of African
slavery is threaded throughout the text and notes of Brooks, Captives and Cousins.
The annual Avignon Conference on Forced Labour and Slavery brings together schol-
ars whose research ranges over times from antiquity to the recent past and over places
across the globe to discuss systems of slavery in comparative perspective.
6. Discussing Claude Levi-Strauss's theory of marriage as a form of gift exchange,
Gayle Rubin explained, "If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men
who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship
rather than a partner to it." See Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the
'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R.
Reiter (New York, 1975), 174. Jane Fishburne Collier, Marriage and Inequality in
Classless Societies (Stanford, CA, 1988).
7. William C. Foster, ed., and Johanna S. Warren, trans., The La Salle Expedition to
Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684-1687 (Austin, TX, 1998),227-29; Fray
Francisco Casaiias de Jesus Marfa to the Viceroy of Mexico, August 15, 1691, in
"Descriptions of the Tejas or Asinai Indians, 1691-1722," trans. Mattie Austin
Hatcher, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 30 (January 1927): 217; Ralph A.
Smith, trans. and ed., "Account of the Journey of Benard de la Harpe: Discovery
Made by Him of Several Nations Situated in the West," ibid. 62 (July 1958): 75-86;
Southwestern Historical Quarterly (October 1958): 246-59; ibid. (January 1959):
371-85; ibid. (April 1959): 525-41; David La Vere, The Caddo Chiefdoms: Caddo
Economics and Politics, 700-1835 (Lincoln, 1998), 1-14, 33-35; Timothy K.
Perttula, "The Caddo Nation": Archaeological and Ethnohistoric Perspectives
(Austin, TX, 1992), 85, 217-20; Karl Schmitt and Iva Osanai Schmitt, Wichita
Kinship: Past and Present (Norman, n.d.), 23; Gordon M. Sayre, Les Sauvages
Americains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial
Literature (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 14,266.
8. Henri de Tonti, "Memoir Sent in 1693, on the Discovery of the Mississippi and the
Neighboring Nations by M. D. La Salle, from the year 1678 to the Time of his
Death, and by the Sieur de Tonty to the year 1691," in The Journeys of Rene Robert
Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, ed. Isaac Joslin Cox, 2 vols. (New York, 1973), 1: 41-44,
46, esp. 42.
9. Juan de Ulibarri, "The Diary of Juan de Ulibarri to El Cuartelejo, 1706," in After
Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696-1727, trans. Alfred
Barnaby Thomas (Norman, OK, 1935), 59-77; Charles Wilson Hackett, trans.,
Pichardo's Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas, 4 vols. (Austin,
1931), 2:179-87; Mildred Mott Wedel, The Wichita Indians, 1541-1750:
Ethnohistorical Essays (Lincoln, NE, 1988), 101; Kate L. Gregg, "The Missouri Reader:
Explorers in the Valley, Part II," Missouri Historical Review 39 (July 1945): 511.
10. Gregg, "Missouri Reader," 512; Smith, trans. and ed., "Account of the Journey of
Benard de la Harpe," 529; Wedel, "Claude-Charles Dutisne," 102,106.
11. Etienne de Bourgmont identified the Indians as "Padoucas"-a French ethnonym
that some scholars have asserted referred to Comanches. But Thomas W. Kavanagh
and other Plains historians have convincingly argued that until 1750 it described
Apaches. Frank Norall, trans., "Journal of the Voyage of Monsieur de Bourgmont,
Knight of the Military Order of Saint Louis, Commandant of the Missouri River
[which is] above That of the Arkansas, and of the Missouri [Country], to the
40 Juliana Barr

Padoucas," in Bourgmont, Explorer of the Missouri, 1698-1725, by Frank Norall

(Lincoln, NE, 1988), 125-61, esp. 152 and 154-55; Henri Folmer, "De Bourgmont's
Expedition to the Padoucas in 1724, the First French Approach to Colorado,"
Colorado Magazine 14 (July 1937): 124-27; Henri Folmer, "Etienne Veniard de
Bourgmont in the Missouri Country," Missouri Historical Review 36 (April 1942):
279-98; Thomas W. Kavanagh, The Comanches: A History, 1706-1875 (Lincoln,
NE, 1996), 65-66.
12. Pierre Fran<;:ois Xavier de Charlevoix, History and General Description of New
France, trans. John Gilmary Shea, 6 vols.( New York, 1872), 6: 32-38; Daniel H.
Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower
Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992); archival material from
Correspondence Generale, French Dominion, Mississippi Provincial Archives,
vols. 9, 3, cited in Almon Wheeler Lauber, Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within
the Present Limits of the United States (New York, 1913), 75; Sieur Jean-Baptiste Le
Moyne de Bienville, "Memoir on Louisiana, the Indians and the Commerce that Can
Be Carried on with Them" (1726), in Mississippi Provincial Archives, French
Dominion, vol. III: 1704-1743, ed. Dunbar Rowland and A. G. Sanders (Jackson,
1932),532; Russell Magnaghi, "Changing Material Culture and the Hasinai of East
Texas," Southern Studies 20 (Winter 1981); W. W. Newcomb and W. T. Field, "An
Ethnohistoric Investigation of the Wichita Indians in the Southern Plains," in
Wichita Indian Archaeology and Ethnology: A Pilot Study, ed. Robert E. Bell,
Edward B. Jelks, and W. W. Newcomb (New York, 1974).
13. Twenty-member bands of these confederacies and at least three other independent
Caddo bands clustered in fertile valleys along the Angelina, Neches, Sabine, and Red
rivers. Town centers, surrounded by temple mounds built by the Caddoans' ancestors,
still served as the residence of paramount chiefs and the locus for public gatherings
and ceremony. People in the ranked, matrilineal societies, with well-developed
political and ceremonial governing structures, lived in kin-based hamlets located
near the agricultural fields radiating out from the town centers. La Vere, Caddo
Chiefdoms; Perttula, "Caddo Nation."
14. Agriculture played a central role in Wichitas' socioeconomics and tied them to their
grass-lodge villages much of the year, but they spent the fall and winter in mobile
camps while men hunted deer and bison. Their extensive crop cultivation and cen-
tralized role in French-Indian market exchange created subsistence and economic
practices more sedentary than those of their Comanche neighbors. Wichita bands
active in Texas included Tawakonis, Taovayas, Iscanis, Wacos, and Wichitas proper.
Early French identification of Wichitas as "Panis Piques" or "Pani-piquets" in refer-
ence to their tattoos and linguistic similarities to Pawnees later confused distinctions
between Wichitas and Pawnees (known simply as "Panis"). Pawnees, unlike
Wichitas, constituted a significant number of the Plains Indians sold north into
slavery in New France. W. W. Newcomb Jr., The People Called Wichita (Phoenix,
AZ, 1976); Elizabeth A. H. John, "A Wichita Migration Tale," American Indian
Quarterly 7 (Fall 1983): 57-63; Susan C. Vehik, "Wichita Culture History," Plains
Anthropologist 37 (November 1992): 311-32; F. Todd Smith, The Wichita Indians:
Traders of Texas and the Southern Plains, 1540-1845 (College Station, TX, 2000).
15. Comanches were a branch of northern Shoshones of the Great Basin region whose
acquisition of horses had led to their rapid evolution into a mounted, mobile, mili-
tary power. During the seventeenth century, Comanches had moved into the plains
of eastern Colorado and western Kansas and then turned south, pulled by abundant
bison herds, Spanish horses ready for the taking, and French trade goods ready for
the bartering. Identified as eastern-dwelling bands of Kotsotekas and western-dwelling
bands of Jupes and Yamparicas, Comanches operated as independent, kin-based
 From Captives to Slaves 41

hunting and gathering groups rather than as united confederacies such as those of
Caddo bands of east Texas and Wichita bands of northern Texas. Thomas W.
Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, 1706-1875
(Lincoln, NE, 1996); Morris Foster, Being Comanche: A Social History of an
American Indian Community (Tucson, 1991); Gerald Betty, Comanche Society:
Before the Reservation (College Station, 2002); D. B. Shimkin, "Shoshone-
Comanche Origins and Migrations," in Proceedings of the Sixth Pacific Science
Congress of the Pacific Science Association (Berkeley, CA, 1940), 17-25.
16. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 116-22,244-75;
Joseph Zitomersky, "The Form and Function of French-Native American Relations in
Early Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Louisiana," in Proceedings of the Fifteenth
Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, Martinique and Guadeloupe, May
1989, ed. Patricia Galloway and Philip P. Boucher (New York, 1992).
17. Clarence H. Webb and Hiram F. Gregory, The Caddo Indians of Louisiana (1978;
Baton Rouge, LA, 1986); Hiram Ford Gregory, "Eighteenth Century Caddoan
Archaeology: A Study in Models and Interpretation" (PhD diss., Southern Methodist
University, 1973); Dayna Bowker Lee, "Indian Slavery in Lower Louisiana during
the Colonial Period, 1699-1803" (MA thesis, Northwestern State University of
Louisiana, 1989). On reciprocity and political economies, see Patricia C. Albers,
"Symbiosis, Merger, and War: Contrasting Forms of Intertribal Relationship among
Historic Plains Indians," in The Political Economy of North American Indians,
ed. John Moore (Lincoln, NE, 1993),94-132; Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form
and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (1924; New York,
1954); Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972); and Claude Levi-
Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John
Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham (1949; Boston, MA, 1969). La Vere,
Caddo Chiefdoms; Daniel A. Hickerson, "Trade, Mediation, and Political Status in
the Hasinai Confederacy," Research in Economic Anthropology 17 (1996): 149-68.
18. Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 177-97; Louis Billouart de Kerlerec, "Projet de paix
et d'alliance avec les Cannecis et les avantages qui en peuvent resulter, envoye par
Kerlerec, gouverneur de la province de la Louisianne, en 1753," in "Un Memoire
Politique du XVIII Siecle Relatif au Texas" (An Eighteenth-Century Political Memoir
Relating to Texas), by M. Le Baron Marc de Villiers du Terrage, Journal de la Societe
des Americanistes de Paris 3 (1906): 67-76.
19. J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American
Indian in the Old South (New York, 1981); Marcel Trudel, L'esclavage au Canada
Fran(ais: Histoire et conditions de l'esclavage (Slavery in French Canada: History
and Conditions of Slavery) (Quebec, 1960); Brett Rushforth, " 'A Little Flesh We
Offer You': The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France," William and Mary
Quarterly 60 (October 2003): 777-808; Daniel H. Usner Jr., "From African
Captivity to American Slavery: The Introduction of Black Laborers to Colonial
Louisiana," Louisiana History 20 (Winter 1979): 25-48; James T. McGowan,
"Planters without Slaves: Origins of a New World Labor System," Southern
Studies 16 (Spring 1977): 5-26; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial
Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century
(Baton Rouge, LA, 1992); Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free
Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham, NC, 1997); Gilbert
C. Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in
Louisiana, 1763-1803 (College Station, TX, 1999), 3-17.
20. Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men; Brown, Strangers in Blood; Peterson,
"People In Between"; Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties; Jennifer M. Spear, " 'They Need
Wives': Metissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana,
42 Juliana Barr

1699-1730," in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History,

ed. Martha Hodes (New York, 1999). For the statement of abbe Raynal, see
Hackett, trans., Pichardo's Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas, 1: 258.
21. Marcel Giraud, A History of French Louisiana, vol. II: Years of Transition,
1715-1717, trans. Brian Pearce (Baton Rouge, LA, 1993), 129; Jennifer M. Spear,
"Colonial Intimacies: Legislating Sex in French Louisiana," William and Mary
Quarterly 60 (January 2003): 75-98; Carl A. Brasseaux, "The Moral Climate of
French Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1763," Louisiana History 27 (Winter 1986);
Carl A. Brasseaux, "The Administration of Slave Regulations in French Louisiana,
1724-1766," ibid., 21 (Spring 1980); Charles Edward O'Neill, Church and State in
French Colonial Louisiana: Policy and Politics to 1732 (New Haven, 1966); Mathe
Allain, "Manon Lescaut et Ses Consoeurs: Women in the Early French Period,
1700-1731," in Proceedings of the Fifth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical
Society, ed. James J. Cooke (Lanham, MD, 1980); Elizabeth Shown Mills,
Natchitoches, 1729-1803: Abstracts of the Catholic Church Registers of the French
and Spanish Post of St. Jean Baptiste des Natchitoches in Louisiana (New Orleans,
LA, 1977); Bolton, trans. and ed., Athanase de Mezieres and the Louisiana-Texas
Frontier, 1: 48, 64,90,91, 162, 168,2: 76; Lee, "Indian Slavery," 87,92.
22. Peter Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain (Princeton, 1982), 328, 344-48;
Daniel T. Reff, Disease, Depopulation, and Cultural Change in Northwestern New
Spain, 1518-1764 (Salt Lake City, UT, 1991); Jose Cuello, "The Persistence of
Indian Slavery and Encomienda in the Northeast of Colonial Mexico, 1577-1723,"
Journal of Social History 21 (Summer 1988): 683-700; Susan M. Deeds, "Rural
Work in Nueva Vizcaya: Forms of Labor Coercion on the Periphery," Hispanic
American Historical Review 69 (August 1989): 425-49; Peter Bakewell, Silver
Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (Cambridge, UK,
1971); Vito Alessio Robles, Coahuila y Texas en la epoca colonial (Coahuila and
Texas in the Colonial Period) (Mexico City, 1978); Silvio Zavala, Los Esclavos
Indios en Nueva Espana (Indian Slaves in New Spain) (Mexico City, 1967),
179-349.
23. Brooks, Captives and Cousins; L. R. Bailey, The Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest
(Los Angeles, 1966); Nancy Parrott Hickerson, The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders
of the South Plains (Austin, TX, 1994), 32-33, 48, 80, 103-4, 113-14; Fray Damian
Mazanet to Don Carlos de Sigiienza, 1690, in Spanish Exploration in the Southwest,
1542-1706, ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York, 1916),282.
24. Alfred Barnaby Thomas, trans., Alonso de Posada Report, 1686: A Description of
the Area of the Present Southern United States in the Late Seventeenth Century
(Pensacola, FL, 1982),36-37; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 121-42.
25. Thomas R. Hester, "Texas and Northeastern Mexico: An Overview," in Columbian
Consequences, vol. 1: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish
Borderlands West, ed. David Hurst Thomas (Washington, DC, 1989), 191-211; The
Indians of Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico: Selected Writings of Thomas
Nolan Campbell (Austin, TX, 1988); Donald Chipman, Spanish Texas, 1519-1821
(Austin, TX, 1992), 182-83,205-7,249-50.
26. Morris Edward Opler, "The Kinship Systems of the Southern Athabaskan-Speaking
Tribes," American Anthropologist 38 (October 1936): 620-33; Morris E. Opler,
"Lipan Apache," in Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William C.
Sturtevant, vol. 13; Plains, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Washington, DC, 2001),
part 2,941-52; Thomas F. Schilz, Lipan Apaches in Texas (El Paso, 1987); Dolores
A. Gunnerson, The Jicarilla Appaches: A Study in Survival (DeKalb, 1974); Gary
Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580-1830: Ethnogenesis and
Reinvention (Norman, OK, 1999), 105-44; Jose Cortes, Views from the Apache
 From Captives to Slaves 43

Frontier: Report on the Northern Provinces of New Spain, ed. Elizabeth A. H. John,
trans. John Wheat (Norman, OK, 1989).
27. William Edward Dunn, "Apache Relations in Texas, 1718-1750," Quarterly of the
Texas State Historical Association 14 (January 1911): 198-274.
28. James William Brodman, Ransoming Captives in Crusader Spain: The Order of
Merced on the Christian-Islamic Frontier (Philadelphia, PA, 1986); Jarbel
Rodriguez, "Financing a Captive's Ransom in Late Medieval Aragon," Medieval
Encounters: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue
9 (April 2003): 164-81; Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Dunn, "Apache Relations in
Texas"; Juliana Barr, "'Traces of Christians': A Spectrum of Indian Bondage in
Spanish Texas," in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Alan Gallay (Lincoln, NE,
forthcoming).
29. Ana Marfa Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on
Mexico's Northern Frontier (Tucson, AZ, 1995),37; Fray Benito Fernandez de Santa
Ana to Fray Guardian Pedro del Barco, February 20, 1740, in The San Jose Papers:
The Primary Sources for the History of Mission San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo
from Its Founding in 1720 to the Present, part I: 1719-1791, trans. Benedict
Leutenegger, ed. Marion A. Habig (San Antonio, TX, 1978), 64; Proceedings
concerning the Infidelity of the Apaches, June 28, 1738, Bexar Archives (Center for
American History, University of Texas, Austin); Fray Benito Fernandez de Santa Ana
to Viceroy Archbishop Juan Antonio de Vizarron, June 30, 1737, in Letters and
Memorials of the Father Presidente Fray Benito Fernandez de Santa Ana,
1736-1754: Documents on the Missions of Texas from the Archives of the College
of Queretaro, ed. Benedict Leutenegger (San Antonio, TX, 1981),26-27.
30. Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 121-42; Gilberto M. Hinojosa and Anne A. Fox,
"Indians and Their Culture in San Fernando de Bexar," in Tejano Origins in
Eighteenth-Century San Antonio, ed. Gerald E. Poyo and Gilberto M. Hinojosa
(Austin, 1991), 109-10; Jesus F. de la Teja, San Antonio de Bexar: A Community on
New Spain's Northern Frontier (Albuquerque, NM, 1995), 122-23.
31. Don Prudencio de Orobio y Bazterra, Order for Investigation and Questionnaire,
June 25,1738, Proceedings concerning the Infidelity of the Apaches; Testimony of
lieutenant Mateo Perez, chief constable Vicente Alvarez Travieso, captain Jose de
Urrutia, alferez Juan Galvan, and corporal Juan Cortina, June 26-28, 1738, ibid.;
Dunn, "Apache Relations in Texas," 244-45.
32. Testimony of Mateo Perez, Vicente Alvarez Travieso, and Jose de Urrutia,
Proceedings concerning the Infidelity of the Apaches; Dunn, "Apache Relations in
Texas," 245-47.
33. Statement of Don Prudencio de Orobio y Bazterra, August 18, 1738, Proceedings
concerning the Infidelity of the Apaches; Dunn, "Apache Relations in Texas,"
245-46.
34. Order of Governor Don Prudencio de Orobio y Bazterra, February 16, 1739,
Proceedings concerning the Infidelity of the Apaches; Benito de Fernandez de Santa
Ana to Viceroy Archbishop Juan Antonio de Vizarron, November 24, 1739, in
Letters and Memorials of the Father Presidente Fray Benito de Fernandez de Santa
Ana, ed. Leutenegger, 32.
35. Max L. Moorhead, "Spanish Deportation of Hostile Apaches: The Policy and the
Practice," Arizona and the West 17 (Autumn 1975): 210-11, 215, 217.
36. Dunn, "Apache Relations in Texas," 248-62; Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed
in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontations of Indians, Spanish, and French in the
Southwest, 1540-1795 (College Station, TX, 1975),273-303,336-405.
37. Casaiias de Jesus Marfa to the Viceroy of Mexico, August 15, 1691, in "Descriptions
of the Tejas or Asinai Indians, 1691-1722," trans. Hatcher, 208; Juan Bautista
44 Juliana Barr

Chapa, Texas and Northeastern Mexico, 1630-1690, ed. William C. Foster, trans.
Ned F. Brierley (Austin, TX, 1997); Fray Francisco Hidalgo to the Viceroy,
November 4, 1716, in "Descriptions of the Tejas or Asinai Indians, 1691-1722,"
trans. Mattie Austin Hatcher, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 31 (July 1927): 60;
Fray Isidro de Espinosa, "Ramon's Expedition: Espinosa's Diary of 1716," trans.
Gabriel Tous, Preliminary Studies of the Texas Catholic Historical Society 1 (April
1930): 4-24; Don Domingo Ramon, "Captain Don Domingo Ramon's Diary of his
Expedition into Texas in 1716," trans. Paul J. Foik, ibid., 2 (April 1933): 3-23; Fray
Francisco Celiz, Diary of the Alarcon Expedition into Texas, 1718-1719, trans. Fritz
Hoffmann (Los Angeles, CA, 1935), 83.
38. Don Antonio Valverde y Cosio, governor of New Mexico, to Marquis de Valero,
November 3, 1719, in Pichardo's Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas,
trans. Hackett, 1:193, 206; Testimonies of Luis Febre, Pedro Satren and Joseph
Miguel Riballo before Governor Tomas Velez Cachupfn, April 13, 1749, and
March 5, 1750, ibid., 3: 299-320; testimony of Felipe de Sandoval, March 1, 1750,
ibid., 320-24; Statement of Antonio Trevino to Governor Angel Mattos y Navarrete,
July 13, 1765, Bexar Archives.
39. Pedro de Rivera, "Diary and Itinerary of What Was Seen and Examined During the
General Inspection of Presidios in the Interior Provinces of New Spain," in
Imaginary Kingdom: Texas as Seen by the Rivera and Rubi Military Expeditions,
1727 and 1767, ed. Jack Jackson (Austin, TX, 1995), 35; Marques de Rub!,
"Dictamen of April 10, 1768," trans. Ned. F. Brierley, ibid., 182-83; Paul D.
Nathan, trans., Lesley Byrd Simpson, ed., The San Saba Papers: A Documentary
Account of the Founding and Destruction of San Saba Mission (San Francisco,
CA, 1959),71,107-15,136,145.
40. Alexandro O'Reilly, Proclamation, December 7, 1769, in Spain in the Mississippi
Valley, 1765-1794, ed. Lawrence Kinnaird (Washington, DC, 1949), 2: 126-27;
Alejandro O'Reilly to Athanase de Mezieres, January 23, 1770, in Athanase de
Mezieres and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, ed. and trans. Bolton, 1: 135-36, 152; de
Mezieres to Governor of Louisiana Luis Unzaga y Amezaga, May 20, 1770, ibid.,
166-68, esp. 166.
41. On the actions of Fran<;;ois Morvant, Jacque Ridde, and Pierre Raimond in 1770, see
Lee, "Indian Slavery," 83-85; and Mills, Natchitoches, 1729-1803, entries 1016,
1101, 1619, 1953, 2297, 2901. For the first and last appearances of the Morvant
family in the town censuses, see Censuses of Nuestra Senora del Pilar de
Nacogdoches for 1784 and 1805, Bexar Archives.
42. Stephen Webre, "The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana," Louisiana
History 25 (Spring 1984): 117-35; Hans W. Baade, "The Law of Slavery in Spanish
Louisiana, 1769-1803," in Louisiana's Legal Heritage, ed. Edward F. Haas
(Pensacola, FL, 1983), 43-86; Winston de Ville, ed., Natchitoches Documents,
1732-1785: A Calendar of Civil Records from Fort St. Jean Baptiste in the French
and Spanish Province of Louisiana (Ville Platte, LA, 1994), 10, 17, 35.
43. Present-day Ebarb in Sabine Parish in northwestern Louisiana is populated by
descendants of enslaved Lipan Apaches, indigenous Caddos, and immigrant
Choctaws, and Louisiana officially recognizes the Choctaw-Apache People of Ebarb
among the state's American Indian groups. See Official Home Page of the Choctaw-
Apache Tribe of Louisiana at http://cate.50megs.comlindex.htm (accessed March
24, 2005). N. M. Miller Surrey, The Commerce of Louisiana during the French
Regime, 1699-1763 (New York, 1916),226-49; Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves
in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 116-22,244-75. On Maria Modesta, see Mills,
Natchitoches, 1729-1803, entries 2391, 2876, 2973. On Therese, see ibid., entries
2392, 2447, 2992, 3448. On Marie Rosalie, see ibid., entries 2354, 2425, 2524,
 From Captives to Slaves 45

2863, 3013, 3394. See also Elizabeth Shown Mills, Natchitoches, 1800-1826:
Translated Abstracts of Register Number Five of the Catholic Church Parish of
St. Franr;ois des Natchitoches in Louisiana (New Orleans, LA, 1980), entry 43 for
Marie Modesta; and Elizabeth Shown Mills, Natchitoches Colonials: Censuses,
Military Rolls, and Tax Lists, 1722-1803 (Chicago, 1981). Gary B. Mills, The
Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge, LA, 1977), 50-51,
83-88; H. Sophie Burton, "Free People of Color in Spanish Colonial Natchitoches:
Manumission and Dependency on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1766-1803,"
Louisiana History 45 (Spring 2004): 180; Charles R. Maduell, The Census Tables
for the French Colony of Louisiana from 1699-1732 (Baltimore, MD, 1972);
Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Social and Family Patterns on the Colonial Louisiana
Frontier," Sociological Spectrum 2 (July-December, 1982): 238.
44. John Sibley, "Historical Sketches of the several Indian tribes in Louisiana, south of the
Arkansas river, and between the Mississippi and river Grande" 1806, in American
State Papers, vol. 1 (Washington, DC, 1832), 721-31, esp. 723; Pueblo de Nuestra
Senora del Pilar de Nacogdoches: List of Families in the Said Pueblo Taken by Captain
and ommandant, Don Jose Joaqufn Ugarte," January 1, 1804, Bexar Archives;
"Report of the Missions Occupied by the Priest of the College of Our Lady of
Guadalupe de Zacatecas in Said Province [Texas], Their Progress to the End of
1804 ... ," December 31, 1804, ibid.; "Pueblo of Nuestra Senora del Pilar de
Nacogdoches: Census of the families who live in the aforesaid pueblo, compiled by
Commandant Jose Joaqufn Ugarte," January 1, 1805, ibid.; Jose Marfa Guadiana,
"Jurisdiction of the Pueblo de Nuestra Senora del Pilar de Nacogdoches: Houses
located on the eastern side of the Sabinas River," November 1805, ibid.; Sebastian
Rodriguez, "Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de Pilar of Nacogdoches: Census of the families
living in said town and its jurisdiction," January 1, 1806, ibid.; "Report on the
Barbarous Indians of the Province of Texas, Dec. 27, 1819," in "Texas in 1820," trans.
Mattie Austin Hatcher, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 23 (July 1919): 47-53.
45. A few men did register their paternity of children at baptism. See, for example, the
children of Pierre Sebastian Prudhomme and Naillois, "an Indian woman," and Jean
Baptiste Samuel and Jeanne, "a woman of the Canneci (Apache) nation," in Mills,
Natchitoches, 1729-1803, entries 2245,3444,3049. For uses of women as objects
of exchange, see Lee, "Indian Slavery."
46. Moorhead, "Spanish Deportation of Hostile Apaches"; Christon I. Archer, "The
Deportation of Barbarian Indians from the Internal Provinces of New Spain,
1789-1810," Americas 29 (January 1973): 376-85.
47. Baron de Ripperda to Bucareli y Ursua, July 5,1772, in Athanase de Mezieres and
the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, trans. and ed. Bolton, I, 322.
48. Ripperda to Bucareli y Ursua, March 30, 1773, Bexar Archives; Ripperda to Bucareli y
Ursua, July 5, August 2,1772, in Athanase de Mezieres and the Louisiana-Texas
Frontier, trans. and ed. Bolton, I, 322, 335; Ripperda to governor of Louisiana
Unzaga y Amezaga, September 8, 1772, ibid., 348.
49. Bucareli y Ursua to Ripperda, March 24, April 28, 1772, Bexar Archives; Ripperda
to Unzaga y Amezaga, May 26, 1772, in Athanase de Mezieres and the Louisiana-
Texas Frontier, trans. and ed. Bolton, I, 273.
50. Bucareli y Ursua to Ripperda, June 16, 1772, Bexar Archives; Ripperda to Unzaga y
Amezaga, May 26, 1772, in Athanase de Mezieres and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier,
trans. and ed. Bolton, I, 274.
51. Ripperda to Bucareli y Ursua, July 5, 1772, in Athanase de Mezieres and
the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, trans. and ed. Bolton, I, 321-22.
52. Fray Juan Domingo Arricivita, Apostolic Chronicle ofJuan Domingo Arricivita: The
Franciscan Mission Frontier in the Eighteenth Century in Arizona, Texas, and
46 Juliana Barr

the Californias, trans. George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA,
1996),2: 25.
53. Though long identified as indigenous to Texas, Tonkawas, like Comanches and
Wichitas, appear to have been Plains peoples who migrated south into present-day
Texas in the late seventeenth century. Living up to their name "Tonkawa" (a Wichita
[Waco] name meaning "they all stay together"), they had joined with other cultural
and linguistic groups for defense by the late eighteenth century. Tonkawas and their
new allies lived in nonsedentary hunting and gathering communities that were organ-
ized into matrilineal clans, with many clans representing once-autonomous groups of
Mayeye, Yojuane, Ervipiame, Sana, and Tonkawa proper. Domingo Cabello to com-
mandant general of the Interior Provinces, Teodoro de Croix, March 18, 1779, Bexar
Archives; William W. Newcomb Jr. and Thomas N. Campbell, "Tonkawa," in
Handbook of North American Indians, 12, ed. DeMallie, part 2,953-64.
54. Christobel Hilario de Cordoba, Interim Lieutenant at Nacogdoches, Report,
Aug. 26, 1786, Bexar Archives. For Spanish captives in Indian hands on other
Spanish frontiers, see Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 179-93; and Susan Migden
Socolow, "Spanish Captives in Indian Societies: Cultural Contact along the
Argentine Frontier, 1600-1835," Hispanic American Historical Review 72
(February 1992): 73-99.
55. Cabello to commandant general Felipe de Neve, August 3,1784, Bexar Archives.
56. Archer, "Deportation of Barbarian Indians from the Internal Provinces of New
Spain"; Al B. Nelson, "Juan de Ugalde and Picax-Ande Ins-Tinsle, 1787-1788,"
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 43 (April 1940): 450; Jean Louis Berlandier, The
Indians of Texas in 1830, ed. John C. Ewers, trans. Patricia Reading Leclercq
(Washington, 1969),41.
 Chapter 2

"Meddling with Emancipation": Baptists, Authority,

and the Rift over Slavery in the Upper South

Monica Najar

From The Journal of the Early Republic

In 1808, a crisis occurred in the Mount Tabor Baptist Church of Kentucky.

In the ten years since its 1798 constitution, the members had communed
closely, addressing each other as brother and sister, ritually washing each
other's feet in keeping with early Christian practice, watching over each
other's conduct, remonstrating one another when necessary, and celebrating
the Eucharist. Their fellowship was shattered in April 1808 when John
Murphy, clerk of the church, rose from his seat and "declared nonfellowship
with the church on account of slavery." Following Murphy's lead, Elijah
Davidson then rose and withdrew from the church because it tolerated
slaveholding among its members. In the following five months, two men
and four women left the church for the same reasons. 1 Far from a singular
event, this rupture was repeated in churches across the state and was the cul-
mination to a decades-long debate within Baptist churches in the Upper
South over the issue of slaveholding. Before the crisis was settled, Baptists
would be forced to rethink their doctrines, worldview, and relationship to
the new republic.
As Baptists began to evangelize the Upper South, they addressed the com-
plicated issue of slaves and slavery. Slaves were part of the early audiences
for Baptist itinerants in the 1760s and 1770s, and, after the War for
Independence, slaves began to join churches in increasing numbers. This
phenomenon forced Baptists into the quagmire of slavery as they con-
structed a coherent theology and a network of churches in a revolutionary
age. The churches they built were biracial with white and black members.
White and black evangelicals together faced the contradictions between
their theology that emphasized the equality of souls, and the institution of
48 Monica Najar

slavery that reified inequality. Churches became the arenas in which south-
erners debated what slavery meant in an evangelical society and what
religion meant in a slave society.2
The ongoing efforts of Baptists to claim an expansive authority for their
churches and to draw a divide between their members and "the world"
created a variety of thorny issues for them, ranging from the most intimate
(such as sexual conduct and marriage) to the decidedly public (such as busi-
ness practices and political behavior). But it was their debates about slavery
that soon constituted the most serious crisis in early evangelical churches.
As with all other issues facing their members, Baptist churches claimed an
oversight of the relationships and behavior of masters, mistresses, and
slaves-a claim that allowed churches to intrude on the authority of white
male householders and to serve as the final arbiters of treatment of slaves.
Some Baptist ministers even attempted to inscribe the theology of the equal-
ity of all souls into church policy, issuing declarations against slaveholding
and creating emancipation plans. These efforts, met by hostility, rapidly cre-
ated dissension within and among church congregations, so much so that in
the 1790s, many Baptists began to distance themselves from antislavery
statements to quell developing conflicts. Consequently, antislavery seemed
to disappear in the region. But, in fact, antislavery Baptists, or as they were
known, "emancipation" or "emancipating" Baptists, far from going quietly,
became more radical. Most vocal partisans migrated to Kentucky, making it
a battleground between those for and against slaveholding that would result
in a clash that would divide brethren and rupture churches.
The debate over the morality of slaveholding, then, was not so much a
political compromise as a hard-fought battle that divided churches, pitted
old friends against one another, and ultimately marginalized the antislavery
position both geographically and politically. Slavery was consequently rede-
fined as a political issue outside the province of churches. While Baptists
continued to insist on their broad authority over their members, a claim that
included master-slave relations, they ceded the issue of the morality of
slavery to the civil state when it proved too divisive.
In their efforts to define their authority, Baptists self-consciously drew
upon the parallel process underway in the nascent governmental bodies.
In the early republic, the nature, structures, and powers of both state and
local governments were in flux, and individuals and groups sought to
define the boundaries and authority of government, a dynamic that has
been recently explicated in the burgeoning and innovative literature on
the emerging state and its political culture. This process, significantly,
ought not to be understood as wholly governmental or even wholly
secular. There was an analogous process underway in a number of
denominations, as sectarian groups sought to determine the appropriate
boundaries of the religious realm and, hence, the civil realm. Here, too,
these institutions sought to define and expand their authority, sometimes
by limiting the authority of the state over their members and at other
times seeking to create new arenas of power. In the Upper South, these
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 49

efforts encouraged the broad redefinition of the sacred and secular

realms, as well as the reestablishment of the "proper" relationship
between religion and society. "Sacred" and "secular" are social constructs
that change and assume meaning in historical contexts. As R. Lawrence
Moore points out, " 'secular' as a category for understanding historical
experience depends for its meaning on the existence of something called
'religion,' and vice versa." As one changes, so does its binary opposite. 3
A significant intersection of the different, and often competing, efforts to
determine authority in the new republic was slavery, as both church and
state had legitimate claim to this issue.
For the evangelical Baptists of the Upper South, defining their relation-
ship to the state and the civil realm was an imperative struggle, dictated by
God, to protect the converted from the corrupting influences of worldly
society and to build godly communities on earth. Baptists insisted that God
retained sole authority over ministers and religious worship, and that to
allow civil government any degree of power in the matter compromised
God's supremacy; God, and God alone, could rule their consciences, and
human law held no relevance. In that spirit of fervent defiance, Virginia
Baptists not only resisted colonial restrictions on their practices, they also
embarked, as early as the 1760s, on what was eventually a successful polit-
ical campaign to limit state authority over religious beliefs and practices.
By the 1780s, they were quite self-conscious about defining their authority
against the power of government. Thus, as Americans debated not simply
how the state was defined, but who was defining it, Baptists intended to be
a coherent voice among the clamor seeking to shape civil bodies. Moreover,
they wanted to use state power-and the very concept of the state-to
resolve their own dilemma about the relationship between race and
evangelical fellowship.4
At the heart of this issue are the significance of evangelicals' opposition
to slavery and their subsequent rejection of that stance. Many works in the
last twenty years have identified this compromise of early principles as a key
component of their subsequent success at gaining southern white converts.
Both the Baptists and the Methodists took a similar trajectory. In the early
decades of their southern proselytizing (1770s and 1780s for Baptists and
1780s and 1790s for the Methodists), both sects issued statements against
slavery, and in some cases, investigated ways to limit or eliminate it. Around
the turn of the nineteenth century, each came to reject public declarations or
actions against slavery by its churches or ministers, and by the antebellum
era, both had come full circle, participating in public, explicit support for
slavery. For the Methodists, this transformation has been well documented,
since the hierarchical structure of the church allowed for consistent, if
changing, policies. s Due to the congregational structure of Baptist churches,
which gave each individual church the authority to determine its own poli-
cies, this process has proven more difficult to trace. Yet studying the anatomy
of the Baptists' struggle with antislavery has much to teach us about the
tenacity of antislavery evangelicals as well as the evangelicals' efforts, both
50 Monica Najar

conscious and unwitting, to define a division between religious authority and

civil authority in the new republic.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Baptists' efforts to
reach consensus on the morality of slaveholding threatened to divide the
young denomination permanently. Baptist theology itself forced congre-
gants and churches to face the question directly. In particular, the Baptist
belief in the equality of souls conflicted with the social practices of their
communities, churches, and, for slave owners, their homes. Baptists com-
monly cited New Testament doctrines to articulate a vision of believers that
valued a relative egalitarianism over "earthly" divisions of gender, race, and
status. Baptists insisted that their mission was to strive for a pure
covenanted community that rooted out all sin. Other churches (such as the
Presbyterian Church and the Anglican-Episcopal Church) did not expect
human society to approach the perfection of the heavenly realm. Evangelical
Baptists, however, could not accept such distinctions, and they sought to
create a godly haven in an imperfect world. This required church congrega-
tions to confront the presence of slavery in their midst. How to reconcile
their theology with the reality of slaves and slave owners in their churches
became the subject of frequent and often intense debate. In the 1780s and
1790s, that debate was only beginning, and no clear consensus had yet
emerged.
In the years immediately following the War for Independence, some
Baptists in Virginia and its Kentucky territory came to believe that the
doctrine of the equality of all souls before God necessitated the abolition of
slavery. In the 1780s and 1790s, a number of Baptist churches and associations
(regional bodies designed to guide otherwise autonomous churches) made a
brief and wavering commitment to antislavery. A wavering commitment is,
of course, a contradiction in terms, but contradiction perhaps best captures
white Baptists' struggles with slavery. One of the earliest debates came in
1785 (a year after the Methodists issued and quickly repealed a bold anti-
slavery policy) when the Baptist General Committee of Virginia took up the
issue of slavery. Formed in 1782, this committee of ministers was organized
to apply pressure to the state government to disestablish the Anglican-
Episcopal Church and eliminate its traditional privileges. It was explicitly
and exclusively intended to be the "political mouth ... to the State
Legislature" on church-state relations. Despite its narrow charge, the General
Committee repeatedly issued declarations against slavery to be circulated
among its member churches. The 1785 meeting, when the committee first
took up the question of slavery, resulted in a statement that avowed
"hereditary slavery to be contrary to the word of God." Whereas the
Methodist Conference more definitively laid out its position rejecting slave-
holding and formulated plans for ministers as well as the laity to emancipate
their slaves, the Baptist position was more moderate. In defining slavery in
opposition to God's word, it implied that holding slaves could be, and even
ought to be, defined in the churches as an excommunicable offense, but it
left any such conclusions unstated. 6
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 5I

In 1790, the General Committee took a more forceful stand when the
attendees again considered the "equity, of Hereditary Slavery." The com-
mittee had difficulty formulating a statement so it deferred to the leadership
and words of minister John Leland. Leland submitted a resolution that the
General Committee then issued in its minutes:

Resolved, That slavery, is a violent deprivation of the rights of nature, and

inconsistent with a republican government; and therefore recommend it to our
Brethren to make use of every legal measure, to extirpate the horrid evil from
the land, and pray Almighty God, that our Honourable Legislature may have
it in their power, to proclaim the generalJubilee, consistent with the principles
of good policy.

With this statement, the General Committee broadened the position from
which it attacked slavery; having already found slavery at odds with the word
of God, it also declared slavery contrary to republicanism and natural rights.
Indeed, it was this latter, more secular assault that dominated this second
statement against slavery. And it boldly encouraged Baptists to take legal
steps to eliminate slavery, though it again avoided drawing the logical con-
clusion that slaveholding must therefore be a sinful act that required church
intervention. Significantly, because Baptists valued consensus, it is likely
that most, if not all, of the forty-two ministers and church representatives in
attendance would have had to agree to this declaration before it could be
passed. The General Committee's minutes were published for wide circula-
tion among the represented churches as well as other associations in
Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky.7
As this document circulated, the decentralized structure of Baptist institu-
tions ensured that these antislavery resolutions would be the subject of great
debate and likely strong opposition. Each church was an independent body
that could make its own rules and policies. While this congregational struc-
ture protected the autonomy of each covenanted community, in practice,
Baptists valued consensus and continuity, which promised the converted rela-
tive harmony and gave them confidence in the godliness and purity of their
practices. To ensure this stability, Baptists relied on specific structures and
practices to maintain continuity across time and across churches. In particu-
lar, regional associations played an important role here as they guided
churches on thorny issues. Associations consisted of church representatives
that met annually or semiannually to discuss theology, practices, and disci-
pline and then circulated published minutes of their debates and decisions to
their churches and other regional associations. Church representatives thus
had a chance to consider and debate a host of questions on which they could
bring their collective judgment to bear and distribute their conclusions to
member churches and to other associations that might be faced with the same
problem. While information on a variety of issues such as heresy, price setting,
Freemasonry, and consanguineous marriage commonly circulated, none of
these provoked the backlash of antislavery resolutions.
52 Monica Najar

In 1790, when the General Committee circulated its strong statement

against slavery, the clamor from some quarters was so loud and immediate
that the following year the committee had to reconsider its statement as
well as the one of 1785. Indeed, some church representatives were so
disturbed by the resolution of the previous year that they requested that
the association entertain the question of whether it had deviated from its
original design. Seeking greater agreement among Virginia Baptists, the
General Committee agreed that the antislavery policy should be "again
referred to the district association, and from thence to their respective
churches for their consideration, desiring them to take the matter into
consideration, and shew [sic] their opinion on this subject to the general
committee." By returning the issue of slavery to local associations and their
member churches, the representatives hoped to signal the General
Committee's respect for the appropriate lines of communication (from
independent churches to representative bodies) and for the authority of
the churches. Finally, since the committee's consideration of the morality
of slavery appeared to have inadvertently raised the specter of oppression
from a centralized body, the representatives took pains to assure their
member churches that they did not consider themselves a supervisory
committee and that their sole goal was to promote the political liberty of
the sect. 8
By returning the question of the morality of slavery to the churches and
regional associations, the General Committee hoped to see a consensus
emerge. Divisions, however, emerged instead. The Strawberry Baptist
Association agreed to advise the General Committee "not to Interfere" in
slavery. The Roanoke Association was quite troubled by this issue, explain-
ing that their members wished to be governed by the "spirit of humanity,"
and yet they were "not unanamously [sic] clear in [their] minds whether the
God of nature ever intended, that one Part of the human species should be
held in an abject state of slavery to another part of the same species."
Nonetheless, the association did not believe that the General Committee
should meddle in slavery, citing concerns about how slaves would support
themselves as well as about the general complexity of the issues. The
Ketocton Association was apparently unconvinced by the General
Committee's nod to congregational autonomy and went so far as to suggest
that the General Committee was "dangerous to the liberties of the
Churches." It was two years before the General Committee came to any
type of agreement. When it did, it not only radically departed from its own
position of just a few years earlier, it also signaled a major transformation in
Baptists' understanding of religious and civil authority. In 1793, the com-
mittee again debated hereditary slavery and voted "by a majority (after con-
sidering it a while) that the subject be dismissed from this committee, as
believing it belongs to the legislative body." This was a remarkable rejection
of contemporary Baptist theology and practice. Baptists intended to build a
distinct society within society, a community that would maintain broad
authority over their congregants' lives to ensure the righteousness of each
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 53

individual and the purity of the church. Having established a religious

movement founded on the claim that virtually every issue relating to their
members concerned the church, some Baptist leaders were now willing to
sacrifice a major issue to the civil state, defining it as outside of the province
of the churches and more properly the concern of the government. 9
While the General Committee backed away, other Baptists continued to
press the issue. John Leland was clearly not persuaded by the opponents to
an antislavery position, and he worked to galvanize southern Baptists. In the
same year that he wrote the General Committee's statement, he published
his own essay in which he decried the evils of slavery and the slave trade,
which he denounced as "the horrid work of bartering spirituous liquor for
human souls." Leland objected to the legal structures of slavery that elimi-
nated a slave's ability to testify in court against a white person, leaving the
slave no legal redress if abused; he also complained of federal law which,
under the Constitution, decreed slaves were "possessed of three-fifths of a
man, and two-fifths of a brute." Using a language that presaged rhetoric by
antebellum abolitionists, Leland warned that "the whole scene of slavery is
pregnant with enormous evils. On the master's side, pride, haughtiness,
domination, cruelty, deceit and indolence; and on the side of the slave, igno-
rance, servility, fraud, perfidy and despair." Shortly after the publication of
this essay, Leland moved with his family to New England, and a leading
voice for antislavery in the region was lost. 10
Other Baptist ministers and unordained leaders shared Leland's antislavery
beliefs and attempted to unite brethren in the region against slavery, working
against the emerging coalition of evangelicals that wished to define slavery
as a civil issue. As representatives of their churches to regional associations,
church leaders worked together to issue statements against slavery on behalf
of their churches. In 1796, the Portsmouth Baptist Association, representing
some twenty-two churches, complained of the "Covetousness [that] leads
Christians, with the people of this country in general, to hold and retain, in
abject slavery a set of our poor fellow creatures contrary to the laws of God
and nature." Churches and associations also tried to initiate debate and so
posed "queries" for congregations and associations. In 1796, the Kehukee
Association, which represented churches from North Carolina and Virginia,
debated the question, "Whether Negro Slavery Be Lawful in the Sight of
God or not." Happy Creek Church of Virginia wanted its regional associa-
tion to take up the issue of slavery as well, asking "Can the present practice
of holding Negroes in slavery be supported by scripture and the true principles
of a republican government?" But it was disappointed when the association
"refused to take it up, considering it as an improper subject of investigation
in a Baptist Association, whose only business is to give advice to the
Churches respecting religious matters, and considering the subject of this
query to be the business of government, and a proper subject of
Legislation. ,,11
For many Baptist activists, antislavery agitation was one radical effort
among many to limit the authority of slave owners and to reshape the
54 Monica Najar

institution of slavery. In the early 1790s, as the General Committee was

backing away from its public opposition, minister David Barrow worked to
ameliorate slavery, seizing and creating opportunities to highlight slavery's
injustices to his brethren. When the Virginia Portsmouth Association was
asked to consider whether an unnamed male slave could remarry after his
wife was forcibly removed to a great distance, the representatives debated it
for so long that it was referred to the following yearly meeting. Here too,
they engaged in an extensive debate before the question was withdrawn for
unnamed reasons. Barrow was one of a three-member committee that was
authorized to construct a substitute question. Barrow and his fellow com-
mittee members submitted: "What ought Churches to do with Members in
their Communion, who shall either directly, or indirectly separate married
Slaves, who are come together according to their custom as Man and
Wife?" From judging the appropriate behavior of one particular slave,
Barrow and his committee asked a far broader question about the behavior
of slave owners, a question with the potential to limit owners' ability to sell,
lend, or will their slaves.u
While ministers' names were most frequently identified with antislavery,
the laity played a crucial role in driving the issue of slavery to the center of
debate within congregational life. In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century churches, laypeople not only had the right, but also the responsibility
to secure the "purity" of the covenanted community and therefore could,
and did, raise questions for debate, propose new rules, and instigate disci-
plinary proceedings. Antislavery Baptists took advantage of this opportu-
nity to agitate on the immorality of slavery. Just before a major conflict over
slavery erupted in his church, Brother Palmer charged Brother and Sister
Stephens of mistreating their slave, Nancy, an act that required a church
inquiry into their home. After the couple was acquitted of that charge,
Palmer brought similar charges against them four months later. Similarly,
Brother Samuel Richardson asked his congregation to debate whether
slavery could be justified by scripture or consistent with republican govern-
ment. Women were often restricted from raising formal queries, but they
too became important actors in the local dramas. Antislavery women often
outnumbered antislavery men, creating a sizeable enough faction to disrupt
the working of churches. In South Fork Church, when the antislavery faction
declared themselves, they included six men (including the minister) and ten
women. By exiting their church en masse, these individuals were able to hinder
the remaining body's ability to function. The actions of the laity belie the
idea that antislavery was promoted primarily by the ministry who were
alienated from the mainstream views of their congregants, an argument that
has encouraged scholars to conclude that evangelical antislavery never ran
deep and quickly dried up from a lack of support. To be sure, ministers who
used their positions and pulpits to attack slavery became more notorious in
their communities, but laymen and laywomen acted as well to force congre-
gations to debate slavery and to shelter those ministers who took public
stands against slaveholding. 13
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 55

In the 1780s and 1790s, some antislavery Baptists wanted to move

beyond general statements of opposition and sought to promote bolder
action among their brethren, though they still worked within the confines of
consensus building. Pushed by the antislavery agitation by Happy Creek
and Back-Lick churches, the Ketocton Association in Virginia circulated a
plan for gradual emancipation. The Dover Association also believed that
with member churches it should create a plan to emancipate their slaves
gradually and asked people to aid abolition efforts. Moved by revolutionary
spirit and egalitarian theology, some individual Baptists, such as ministers
George Smith, Hampton Pangburn, and David Barrow, as well as a number
of laypeople including the very wealthy planter Robert Carter, manumitted
their slaves. It is impossible to know how many individuals manumitted
slaves under the influence of Baptists' arguments, but it is clear that even
ardent antislavery Baptists did not seek to demand bold collective action
before 1800. They did not, for instance, attempt to make slaveholding
an excommunicable offense, and emancipation plans were circulated, not
mandated. Some sects in the region offered models for stronger action. In
the 1760s and 1770s, the Quakers, who in the early eighteenth century had
reluctantly tolerated slaveholding among their brethren, took aggressive
steps to eliminate it, agreeing to expel Friends who refused to manumit their
slaves. The Methodists, too, briefly attempted to purge slaveholding among
their ministers and members. In 1784, the Methodist Annual Conference
decreed that ministers could not participate in the slave trade and must free
their slaves where it was legal to do so. Emboldened church leaders agreed
a few months later that members must emancipate their slaves, though local
Methodists reacted with such immediate hostility that these new policies
were suspended within a few months of their introduction. Such an effort on
the part of Baptists might have been easier to attempt (and sustain) because
of the congregational structure that empowered individual churches to pass
their own rules. Ironically, it may have been the Baptist ethic of consensus
building-to compensate for the lack of institutional structures creating
unity-that limited rather than expanded possible strategies.14
Beginning in the 1790s, this debate shifted geographically and rhetori-
cally to new territory. Many devoted antislavery Baptists-both ministers
and laypeople-moved west, including many of the leaders of the antislav-
ery contingent, and "western parts," or what would become Kentucky,
quickly became the battleground between Baptist pro- and antislavery
factions in the Upper South. The West seemed to offer more opportunity for
those that Ronald Hoffman has called "the disaffected." Just as political
dissenters, tax revolters, and land squatters had sought refuge in the western
fringes of white settlement in the late eighteenth century, so did antislavery
Baptists seek a greater chance to create their vision of a godly society. The
West was an exciting prospect for many evangelicals. It offered them the
opportunity to shape community at its broadest level. To be sure, Baptists
were strong believers in the separation of political and church authority and
did not envision a western theocracy or even an evangelical version of a
56 Monica Najar

church establishment. Nonetheless, the promise of the West lay in the possi-
bility of creating pure covenanted communities in a region unfettered by a
church establishment or a society that was hostile to evangelicals. It prom-
ised not just the financial and personal opportunities that drew so many
migrants westward, but also a spiritual hope to have church and faith pre-
cede, and ultimately guide, state and society. It seemed to be a wilderness
free of such abhorred social conventions as dancing schools, theatres, gam-
ing, and, for antislavery Baptists most significantly, slavery. David Barrow
saw Kentucky as idyllic farmland with rich soil, fatted calves, and hard-
working settlers in a land "entirely exempt from the horride [sic] course of
negro slavery." For men such as Barrow, antislavery ideals joined with
financial incentives to influence their decision to migrate. Kentucky farmland,
Barrow explained in his departure letter, would allow him to do justice to
his ministry and support his family without having to turn to the unsavory
practices of speculation or slaveholding. With high expectations of a better
life in a better land, antislavery Baptists, such as Barrow, William Hickman,
and Carter Tarrant, moved their families and made their homes in
Kentucky. This migration, though, spatially marginalized the debate over
slavery to this frontier region: after 1800, debate virtually ceased in
Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee churches and district associations.u
The consolidation of the emancipating Baptists, however, did not lead to
an easier path because there they met with an increasingly intransigent
anti emancipation faction that was determined to eliminate evangelical
debate about slavery. The West, of course, also beckoned those who saw
slavery as a significant and desirable tool for financial success. In the 1780s
and 1790s, Virginians journeyed over the Cumberland Gap in pursuit of
many kinds of opportunity; cheap land, a growing economy, and an under-
developed legal system all made Kentucky a playground for those hoping to
make their fortunes. Some of these migrants, Baptists and non-Baptists
alike, saw slave owning as the foundation of their economic strategy. After
all, the rich farmland in the region did not come without risks. Although
there were few permanent settlements of Native Americans in the Kentucky
region in the late eighteenth century, a number of Indian nations still
claimed the land as hunting grounds. As the number of white migrants
increased, so did the conflicts between the Indians and white settlers, which
quickly became fierce struggles over control of the land. And since white
"ownership" of the land often meant no more than occupying and improv-
ing it, the traumas of the wars threw the American land tenure process into
chaos. Settlers' rude dwellings and young crops were abandoned and
destroyed, perhaps to be reclaimed by former occupants, or new ones, but
often with different boundaries and only until the next violent conflict,
failed crop, or migratory urge. As successive occupants improved and there-
fore claimed the land, they set the stage for decades of conflicts over com-
peting rights of "legitimate" ownership. Within this turmoil, slaves served
as a valuable asset in quickly clearing land and planting and harvesting
crops. That was certainly Jacob Creath's expectation when he moved to
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 57

Kentucky in 1803. Like Barrow, he was a minister struggling to support his

family, but, unlike Barrow, Creath hoped Kentucky would allow him to
compete effectively as a small slave owner. And there were many who
shared his expectations: as early as 1792, there were already over 11,600
slaves in Kentucky. By 1800, that number more than tripled to nearly
36,000. 16 Kentucky then combined antislavery sentiment born of evangeli-
cal and revolutionary optimism, hopes of greater fortune, and the absence
of strong civil authority, all in a region fiercely claimed by competing
groups. This combination proved explosive in both the civil and religious
arenas.
In the civil arena, Kentucky was home to intense debates over emancipa-
tion in the 1790s, particularly during the two campaigns preceding its two
constitutions (1792 and 1799). In both campaigns, slavery proved the most
divisive issue and one that incorporated other large questions of political
representation, economic development, tax structures, population growth,
class structure, and, at its broadest level, the future of Kentucky society. If
the stakes were high, the possibilities were many, particularly before the
ratification of the first constitution. Emancipationists had settled in consid-
erable numbers, feeling that western territories were a good place to work
for emancipation because of the relatively weak slave structure. Slavery pro-
ponents, on the other hand, saw the constitution as the key opportunity to
determine the value of their property (slaves and land) and their place in the
developing local economy. While these groups did not neatly align with reli-
gious affiliation, the evangelical churches, as Joan Wells Coward argues,
provided the core of antislavery activism during the debates of 1791 and
1792. Seven ministers, all opposed to slavery, were elected to serve at the
convention. The Elkhorn Baptist Association even attempted to influence
the delegates and drafted a memorial address to the convention on the topics
of slavery and religious liberty. But these efforts by evangelicals failed
dramatically. Evangelicals failed to weaken or eliminate slaveholding,
and pros lavery leaders were able to pass constitutional protection of slave
property. 17
While the passage of the proslavery article was a substantial blow to the
antislavery movement, emancipation again emerged as a legitimate political
agenda during debates in the late 1790s about whether Kentucky should
create a new state constitution. A provision of the 1792 constitution pro-
vided for such a prospect, and antislavery activists were one voice among
many that sought a constitutional convention. However, even in the few
years between the 1792 constitution and the 1798 campaign, antislavery
opportunities had declined in Kentucky. With Ohio lands opening up after
the Battle of Fallen Timbers, some devout emancipators migrated westward,
while the constitutional protection of slavery had made Kentucky a more
appealing place for slaveholders. Indeed antislavery was such a controver-
sial stance during these debates that some supporters of a constitutional
convention downplayed the possibility of any reconsideration of slavery and
even accused their political opponents of raising the issue to discredit a new
58 Monica Najar

convention. Nevertheless, emancipation was a political issue in this process,

and again, evangelicals, notably Presbyterian minister David Rice among them,
were a leading voice. In this case, the antislavery activists won the battle but
lost the war. They succeeded in calling for a constitutional convention, but
their opponents waged a determined and ultimately successful effort to con-
trol the convention. The election of delegates proved a fierce contest that
pitted Governor James Garrard, a Baptist preacher opposed to slavery, and
his supporters against some of the most prominent Kentucky politicians,
including George Nicholas and John Breckinridge. It exposed regional fault
lines as Lexington emerged as largely antislavery while the Bluegrass region
was solidly pros lavery, and it engulfed national debates over the Alien and
Sedition Acts when antislavery activists attempted to tap into opposition to
those despised acts. Profound divisions emerged in the counties of
Montgomery, Logan, and Mason. But ultimately the majority of voters was
unwilling to reconsider the issue of slavery and elected proslavery represen-
tatives who ensured that the 1799 constitution kept the controversial
guarantee of slave property.18
Even as opportunities were being closed off in the political arena, con-
flicts over slavery erupted again in the religious realm. Frustrated that other
members of their sect were dragging their feet, some antislavery Baptist
ministers and churches began to abandon the moderate consensus model,
preaching outright emancipation and refusing to remain in churches and
associations with slaveholders or those who tolerated slaveholding. Rollings
Fork Church of Kentucky transitioned from agitation to separatism in just
seven years. In 1789, the church asked its association to consider whether it
was "lawful in the sight of God for a member of Christ's Church to keep his
fellow creature in perpetual slavery?" Since the church had only been admit-
ted to the association the previous year, the other representatives may have
considered the controversial question unnecessarily aggressive; in any case,
the other attendees were in no mood to debate such a topic and so, while
conceding the matter was critical, they ruled it was improper for them to
consider it. By 1796, the Rollings Fork congregation was frustrated enough
by the association's refusal to take a stand on the topic to withdraw alto-
gether from the association.The solidly antislavery church at Mill Creek
took similar action in 1794, withdrawing from its association when it
refused to consider a query about slavery.19
Mter the turn of the century, an increasing number of emancipating
Baptists proclaimed in word and deed that quiet coexistence with slavery was
itself a sin and that they would no longer live with that transgression. Insisting
they wanted to worship in churches that wholly reflected their doctrine and
that were untainted by antiemancipation beliefs, they began to create new
churches specifically organized around antislavery principles. Minister Carter
Tarrant, a vocal proponent of emancipation, joined John Sutton in forming
the New Hope Church specifically for antislavery Baptists. Antislavery mem-
bers of the Church at Clover Bottom sought such an opportunity and asked
the other members to dismiss them so they could join a church that supported
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 59

emancipation. In what was an even more shocking move to their fellow

brethren, by 1804, ministers such as David Barrow and Carter Tarrant began
to use their pulpits to preach emancipation as a moral necessity. While these
early sermons did not survive, complaints about them suggest that their posi-
tion was adamant, blunt, and, perhaps worst of all, spoken to audiences that
were increasingly biracial. As Ellen Eslinger demonstrates, while relatively
few African Americans joined Kentucky churches before 1800 (considerably
fewer than had joined Virginia churches), slaves increasingly sought member-
ship during the revivals that began in 1800. Whether influenced by the
growing number of slaves in their churches or disappointment that Kentucky
was looking increasingly like the slaveholding Virginia that they had left
behind, these emancipators adopted a new stand that more aggressively and
publicly challenged their Baptist brethren. 20
This newly radicalized antislavery faction quickly clashed with equally
intransigent anti emancipation Baptists. In this new conflict that spread
through much of Kentucky, neither side sought unanimity or consensus;
each sought to identify godliness with their own position and sin with
the other. Antiemancipation Baptists rejected out of hand the idea that
slaveholding was a sin that required church discipline; in this, they repeated
arguments from the earliest debates over a Baptist position on slavery. But
they went even further. They now sought to make an antislavery stance an
actionable offense that required church discipline. As these individuals
sought to reframe the debate about emancipation and evangelicalism, they
aimed at the most prominent of the antislavery Baptists: the ministers. In
1805, David Barrow found himself at the center of a controversy that would
divide associations and churches and would force longtime colleagues to
turn against him and one other. Barrow was not new to the debate and had
in fact been a voice against slavery for some decades. He freed his own
slaves in the 1780s and publicly spoke against slavery in several venues,
including in a published letter announcing his departure to Kentucky. His
public antislavery beliefs appeared to be no barrier to active leadership in
either Virginia (where he remained until the late 1790s) or in Kentucky.
Upon his arrival in Montgomery County, Kentucky, he became pastor to
three churches and was frequently called to leadership in the regional asso-
ciations where he served on committees, as association moderator, and as
the voice of the association in sermons and circular letters. 21
By 1805, however, Barrow's decades-long attack on slaveholding and
slaveholders had become a thorn in his ministerial brethrens' side. At the
subsequent two meetings of the North District Association, representatives
from another association came and charged Barrow with "Meddling with
emancipation" and "preaching the doctrine of emancipation, to the hurt
and injury of the feelings of the brotherhood." These charges were unprece-
dented, and the unusual method of bringing charges to an association
(which had no authority to discipline individual Baptists) rather than
Barrow's church suggests his accusers' belief that they would have a more
sympathetic audience in this body as well as their determination to see
60 Monica Najar

action taken. The strategy proved effective: the North District Association
agreed to consider the charges and rebuked emancipationists in its annual
"Circular Letter" to the churches. The association warned the brethren
against people who professed godliness and yet were "so far deluded, that
their printing, preaching, and private conversation, go to encourage disobe-
dience in servants, and a revolution in our Civil Government." In 1806, it
required Barrow to be "tried" before a committee of five ministers. Rather
than exhibit remorse and repentance, Barrow spoke, as the meeting minutes
report, "in justification of his conduct on that subject, and brother Barrow
manifest[ ed] no disposition to alter his mode of preaching, as to the afore-
said doctrine." The representatives then took the extraordinary step of
expelling him from his seat in the association. 22
The drama of Barrow's trial and expulsion sent shockwaves through the
regions' churches and associations. A prominent and celebrated leader,
Barrow was among the first generation of southern Baptist converts, and he
was baptized just before joining the ministry. He was a veteran of the
Revolutionary War, but, to this cohort of southern Baptists, he was a hero
because of his engagement in another kind of battle. He was a survivor of the
religious persecution in the 1760s and 1770s, having been nearly drowned
by some men during a preaching appointment. Stories of these early perse-
cutions signified to Baptists their status as a chosen people, repeating the
experiences of the first Christians, and consequently the stories were told,
retold, collected, and published. No doubt the badge of having suffered for
the cause of Christ followed Barrow into his pastorates at various Virginia
and Kentucky churches and contributed to his frequent calls to leadership,
but it did not insulate him from attack once the conflict heated up. As news
of Barrow's trial and expulsion spread throughout the region, Baptists lined
up to take sides in this increasingly polarized debate, and the next thirty-six
months witnessed a bitter and rancorous dispute. The North District
Association did not stop at expelling Barrow; it also sent a committee to his
church to instigate discipline there. Proslavery Baptists took heart from this
ruling and acted against emancipationists in their midst. Churches dismissed
their antislavery ministers and revoked their right to preach. Emancipationists
left churches to set up new ones. Proslavery majorities excommunicated
proemancipation minorities. Ministers on both sides denounced congregants
and colleagues. Hostage to these two adamant positions, many churches in
Kentucky broke apart. Minister John Sutton left his church, Clear Creek, to
join an antislavery church; the following month Clear Creek expelled him for
that action, as well as for speaking contemptuously of other ministers. South
Fork Baptist Church's minister declared himself an "amanspater," and within
six months the church had become divided and the emancipationists left the
congregation. Similar conflicts divided such churches as Lick Creek, Bracken,
Clear Creek, Hillsborough, and Clover Bottom, and this controversy
extended across the Kentucky counties of Woodford, Bracken, Washington,
Clarke, Shelby, Fleming, Montgomery, Barren, Jefferson, Hardin, and
Warren, among others. 23
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 61

Forks of Elkhorn Church provides a window into the demise of these

church communities. Formed in 1788, Forks of Elkhorn was, like most
southern churches, biracial and even included some slaves who were owned
by the governor. The church had faced normal theological, procedural, and
disciplinary issues: in the years preceding the conflict over slavery, the
church considered such matters as the proper time for the Lord's Supper, its
present method of receiving new members, the Son of God's equality with
the Father, and the discipline of members for such offenses as lying, drink-
ing to excess, gambling, adultery, fighting, fraud, spousal abuse, and
disobedience to a master. Like other churches in the region, Forks of
Elkhorn also was swept into the divisive debate about slavery and emanci-
pation. Their minister, William Hickman, was one of the early opponents of
slavery. It is likely that some white members of the church were equally
uncomfortable with slavery, or, at the very least, with how their white
brethren treated their slaves, as evidenced by Brother Palmer's accusations
against Brother and Sister Stephens for mistreating their slave. 24
Forks of Elkhorn Church became polarized over this issue between 1806
and 1807 when the majority began to reject the antislavery minority led by
the popular minister, William Hickman. In May 1806, the church asked
whether "Baptist Preachers are authorized from the word of God to Preach
Emancipation" and soon agreed with the recent ruling of the Elkhorn
Association that ministers should not meddle in this "political Subject." The
church again confronted Hickman when he allowed excommunicated abo-
litionist minister Carter Tarrant to preach at his home. By September of the
next year, tension had built in the church, and it reached a climax when
Hickman went on the offensive, informing "the Church that he was dis-
tressed on account of the practice of Slavery as being tolerated by the mem-
bers of the Baptist Society, therefore declared himself no more in Union with
us, or the Elkhorn Association." The church responded to his withdrawal
by excluding him. Other members who agreed with Hickman also formally
withdrew or simply stopped attending the church. Brother Sisk took
the opportunity to withdraw from the church at the same meeting and was
likewise excluded. Lewis Palmer was called to task for absenting himself.
In response he charged the church with "acting tyrannically in expelling
her former Pastor," an accusation that got him excommunicated. While
other members who stopped attending church meetings chose not to give a
reason, one woman's declaration rocked the church, not simply for
her words but also for who and what she was. Winney was a slave (owned
by a Baptist woman) who had converted to Christianity and had
been admitted to the church. Her conversion and faith, she explained,
convinced her that no true Christian would own slaves, and she said as
much, condemning slavery as well as slaveholders. Winney avowed that she
had "once thought it her duty to serve her Master & Mistress but since the
lord had converted her, she had never believed that any Christian kept
Negroes or Slaves." Furthermore, she contended that there were "thousands
of white people Wallowing in Hell for their treatment to Negroes[,] and she
62 Monica Najar

did not care if there was as many more." (Ironically, it was likely the
church's horror at her words that inspired the church clerk to record
Winney's declarations in greater detail than white emancipationists' state-
ments.) In linking her religious conversion directly to her defiant stand
against slavery and slaveholders, Winney embodied what many southerners
feared most about evangelicalism. Doctrines such as the equality of all souls
together with practices that downplayed social distinctions seemingly
threatened to disrupt the slave system, a charge that many evangelicals had
worked hard to counter. The Forks of Elkhorn Church made it clear that
Winney's statements were unacceptable by expelling her from the church
one month after she leveled the accusations. 25
The polarization of Baptists on the question of slavery was soon felt on
an institutional level as a vocal coterie of emancipationist Baptists in
Kentucky agreed to unite in their own association. In 1807, David Barrow
joined other antislavery Baptists in creating the "Baptized Licking-Locust
Association, Friends of Humanity." In their first meeting, they welcomed
representatives from nine small churches and most of the prominent Baptist
abolitionists in the region. The representatives indicted slave owning in gen-
eral and Christian slave ownership in particular. They rejected the stance of
other Baptists, explaining, "We are now distinguished from our former
brethren, by reason of our professed abhorrence to unmerited, hereditary,
perpetual, absolute unconditional Slavery." Seeking to highlight the discor-
dance of Christianity and slaveholding, they marveled that "(strange as it
may appear in other nations and to future generations,) there are professors
of christianity in Kentucky, who plead for [slavery] as an institution of the
God of mercy; and it is truly disgusting to see what pains they take to drag
the holy scriptures of truth, into the service of this heaven daring iniquity."
Slave apologists, they continued, use such erroneous Scriptural justifications
for slavery as the curse of Noah, or Philemon's servant, Onesimus. In rejecting
these justifications, the emancipators challenged an increasingly common
Baptist practice which was to "exchange the word slave for servant," a
rhetorical turn, they argued, that obscured the reality of the system and
allowed appeals to biblical discussions of the duties of servants. They criti-
cized those ministers who remained silent on the issue of slavery as well as
laypeople who were opposed to slavery but remained in fellowship with
slaveholders. And they publicly denounced their former brethren by naming
the associations who countenanced this obscenity. They identified the
Bracken, Elkhorn, and North District associations as having issued "cruel
censures against the Friends of Humanity [.] Blinded by covetousness and
intoxication with the cup of Babylon, they call evil good and good evil." With
these ringing denouncements of their former brethren, the Licking-Locust
Baptists signaled that there was no room for negotiation or compromise in this
showdown between good and evil. 26
For these emancipation Baptists, the evils of slavery required that they
combine their political and religious identities. Rejecting the antiemancipa-
tionists' bifurcation of religious and civil responsibilities, they embraced a
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 63

dual identity as citizens and as Christians, insisting that each required them
to take an active position to end slavery. "As a political evil," they declared,
"every enlightened wise citizen abhors it; but as it is a sin against God, every
citizen is in duty bound to testify against it." They scorned those who tried
to defer this issue to the civil state, "as if the church was beholden to the
world for assistance in matters of religion, and had no king nor constitution
of her own, and as if the laws of Kentucky constrained men to commit
wickedness in the land, a stigma on our constitution." Carter Tarrant also
embraced his civil identity when in his own speeches and writing about slav-
ery he insisted that it was his constitutional right as a "free citizen" to speak
on this topic. His views, he argued, were entirely in keeping with both the
Constitution and the Bible. And, with mock concern that his opponents
appeared unacquainted with the Constitution, he repeated a few passages he
found relevant; in addition, calling upon a series of civil "proof texts" to
stand alongside his biblical ones, he quoted liberally from Thomas
Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and one of Jefferson's speeches on
the close of the international slave trade to demonstrate the justice of his
cause. In his appeal to "republican principles," he reminded his listeners
that the Revolution and the Bill of Rights demanded liberty as a birthright:
"Your late gallant struggles with British fury, adamantly declare that you
mean to maintain those rights sacred and inviolate ... but oh! how horridly
have we abused this liberty." African Americans, he argued, had "never for-
feited their natural right to liberty, and that an attempt to take it from them
is a violation of nature, reason, philosophy and the word of God."
Seamlessly combining religious and political language that authorized his
brethren's antislavery actions, Tarrant declared simply, "We are republicans
and will hear who we please, even the Pharisees." These references did not
necessarily display a sophisticated engagement with contemporary political
theory, but they were a consistent component of emancipating Baptists'
speeches and writings, and they allowed these individuals to mark themselves
as true republicans, as well as true Christians.27
Both sides of this sectarian debate, then, self-consciously appealed to the
state in their arguments. Emancipationists saw their cause as one with that
of republican government. "Republican principles" mirrored Christian
principles; the Bill of Rights and the Constitution reiterated the message of
the Bible. These twin authorities presented a unified message in regards to
slavery that made easy the path to good principles and to right action. For
the anti emancipationists, the state served a very different role, one that
established a distinct authority for human behavior. For these Baptists, the
boundary between church and state became of supreme importance because
it allowed them to mark slavery as a "political" and "legislative" matter
and, therefore, not their concern. Drawing upon a well-established rhetoric
that divided the godly from the worldly, these Baptists used the boundary
between God and Mammon to delineate the limits of their authority, and, in
the process, they saved themselves and their sect the difficulty of reconciling
egalitarian theology with the profound inequities of slaveholding. They
64 Monica Najar

drew upon this rhetoric, but they could not incorporate it wholly.
Originally, this initial effort to delineate the "religious" from the "secular"
arose from the desire to protect the spiritual realm from being corrupted by
secular authorities and led Baptists to be strong proponents of the disestab-
lishment of the Anglican-Episcopal Church at the same time that churches
took on many civil responsibilities and demanded an expansive authority
over their congregants. But the anti emancipationists argued that unity
among the churches required them to relinquish this authority to the secular
powers that they usually mistrusted. For them, slavery was a "legislative
concern" outside of the province of the church, a designation unshaken by
churches' regular involvement in business disputes, price setting, and politics.
It was this compromise that won out in the debate over slavery. Even the
Elkhorn Association, which had publicly opposed slavery in 1791 to the
Kentucky Constitutional Convention, joined its sister associations in
designating slavery a political issue in 1805. 28
As this settlement emerged as the dominant Baptist practice, Baptists
healed the rifts in their churches and associations quite rapidly with the aid
of significant shifts in their population. The Kentucky emancipationists lost
a number of their most prominent leaders, losses that, given their small
numbers and the hostility of some of the population, must have been pro-
foundly felt. A number of these individuals died during these years. They
had been part of the cohort of early Baptists converted in the 1770s and
1780s as young adults, and by 1810, many of them were in their sixties and
seventies. David Barrow, for instance, died in 1819 at the age of sixty-six.
Likewise, seventy-three-year-old George Smith died in 1820; his younger
brother George Stokes Smith died in 1810, and fifty-one-year-old Carter
Tarrant died in 1816. Some of the younger generation gave up on Kentucky
altogether, often moving to Ohio and Illinois, including Joshua Carman
(who had founded an early emancipation church), Donald Holmes, and
Thomas Whitman. There was enough migration out of Kentucky that
another Friends of Humanity Association was established in Illinois in
1822, explicitly following the model established by the Kentucky society.29
Many of the remaining emancipationists finally accepted the now estab-
lished definition of slavery as a "civil" matter and returned to their
churches. A significant step toward this reconciliation occurred in March of
1808 with Carter Tarrant's published announcement in the Kentucky
Gazette that there would be an attempt to form a secular abolition society
in which "No religious acknowledgement" was necessary. Later that year
the Kentucky Abolition Society was founded. After that year, participation
in the Friends of Humanity declined precipitously, so much so that a promi-
nent Baptist historian who had traveled through the region to research his
1813 history believed they had dissolved. Friends of Humanity finally dis-
banded in 1820, just months after the death of David Barrow. The decline
of this association provided an incentive for emancipationists to return to
their old churches; these churches were also eager to heal the rifts, and they
not only accepted the former members but quickly restored them to their
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 65

former positions. Elijah Davidson, who had declared "nonfellowship" with

his church in 1808, returned two years later; just two months after his read-
mission, he was appointed treasurer of the church, and in 1812, the church
elected him as a deacon. In the following years, other emancipating mem-
bers drifted back. In February 1814, a former preacher in the church, John
Murphy, returned with his wife Rachel; two months later, the church
restored his license to preach. Other churches also experienced these years
as period of reconciliation, including South Fork, Forks of Elkhorn, and
Bracken. Indeed, even the abolitionist slave Winney had her membership
restored in 1812.30
The brokered compromise with slavery after 1810 meant Baptists no
longer would debate the morality of the institution of slavery; instead
churches that were so inclined would consider only specific cases to amelio-
rate some aspects of slavery. Individual incidents involving slaves, masters,
and mistresses would continue to be adjudicated in churches, and these mat-
ters would be accepted, investigated, and determined entirely on the local
level without implying or leading to broader reevaluations of the institution
itself. The deliberations of the Concord Association in 1812 reveal the
contours of this settlement. In a circular letter distributed to member
churches and other associations, the association gave advice on good "family
discipline," first evaluating husbands', wives', and children's duties, before
turning reluctantly to "servants." The association explained that "on this
subject we dwell with unpleasant sensations," and they avoided any use of
the terms "slaves," "slavery," or even designations of race, such as "blacks"
or "Negroes." But, even at this date, the representatives did acknowledge
slavery to be "an evil [as] all agree, but how to Remedy it none can devise."
Rather than take up that issue, the association settled for instructing masters
to use moderation in exercising authority over their slaves and to be just in
what they distributed to their slaves. White members who failed to exercise
moderation, separated married slaves, or denied their slaves basic needs
faced the possibility that they could be called before their churches to
answer for their conduct. But no longer would Kentucky churches and asso-
ciations debate the larger issues of slavery and slaveholding. Now, following
the practices common to other southern states, they would, at best, seek to
ameliorate some aspects of slavery for individual black members.31
In the late eighteenth century, Baptist churches had claim a broad juris-
diction over all aspects of their member's lives. Baptists believed they
answered a divine calling to build covenanted churches of the faithful, and
they asserted godly authority wherever they could. They demanded the
right to judge each others' business practices, land disputes, parental deci-
sions, leisure activities, and marital relations. In this context, it was natural
that churches would insist on their right to monitor master-slave relations
and to debate the morality of slaveholding. But efforts to resolve the con-
tradictions between the belief in the equality of all souls and the presence of
slaves and slaveholders in their churches threatened to tear the denomination
apart. To stem the developing crisis, Baptists redefined slavery to be a civil
66 Monica Najar

rather than a moral and religious issue. This solution meant that individual
cases involving specific slaves and masters would remain within the purview
of the local church, but that Baptists would relinquish any authority over
the question of slavery as an institution. For the first time, they defined an
issue as being outside the province of the churches and exclusively the
concern of the civil government. Thus, the "separation of church and
state "-often understood as a legal delineation enacted in Virginia and
Kentucky during the revolutionary era-was not a straightforward process,
nor was it strictly legal. It was, instead, the political and legal face of a
broader reconceptualization of secular and sectarian bodies in the postrevo-
lutionary era. In other words, as debates over slavery reveal, it was a recon-
struction of civil and religious authority. At the same time that civil
authorities embraced a new relationship between religion and government,
church members too sought to define the appropriate boundaries between
the religious and civil realms in the early republic, a shift that required they
welcome the presence and authority of the state over a matter that had been
a church matter and that they reshape their understanding of their religious
authority.

Notes
Monica Najar is an associate professor in the Department of History at Lehigh University
and a recent fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. She
wishes to thank all those who read and commented on drafts of this article, including
Jeanne Boydston, Charles Cohen, Bethel Saler, Sarah Fatherly, Elizabeth Dolan, John
Lauritz Larson, Ellen Baker, and the fER anonymous readers.
1. Mount Tabor Church Minutes, Barren County, Kentucky, vol. 1, November 5, 1798
through December 1829, presented by Sandra K. Gorin (Glasgow, KY, 1994), Third
Sat. in April, 1808, Third Sat. in July 1808, and Third Sat. in September, 1808,
33-34.
2. Itinerant preachers deliberately sought out and included slaves in their meetings. As
early as the 1780s, some churches were evenly divided between black and white mem-
bers. By 1790, most Baptist churches in the region were biracial congregations, and
African Americans made up nearly one-third of all Virginia Baptists (30.35 percent).
Robert G. Gardner, Baptists of Early America: A Statistical History, 1639-1790
(Atlanta, GA, 1983). Because membership was not a right that could be secured
through simple attendance, parental membership, or an owner's membership, these
numbers represent conscious choices by slaves.
The broader relationship between slavery and evangelicalism is crucial to under-
standing the values of the evangelical sects and their position within southern society
before the Civil War. For important voices in the debate, see Sylvia Frey, Water From
the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991); Christine
Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997); Rhys
Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982; repr., Chapel Hill,
NC,1999); Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago, 1977); and
Randolph Scully, " 'Somewhat Liberated': Baptist Discourses of Race and Slavery in
Nat Turner's Virginia, 1770-1840," Explorations in Early American Culture 5
(2001): 328-71.
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 67

3. R. Lawrence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture

(New York, 1994), 7-8. Baptists division of the world into secular and sacred
realms would seem to have much in common with the public and private spheres,
posited in Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger in associa-
tion with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989). Baptists did often use the
words "public" and "private" to encapsulate the outside society (public) from
church matters (private). But they did not understand, nor do I mean to invoke, a
division between a civic society of politics, opinions, and discourse and a private
world of family and economy. Instead, their division between the godly and the
secular centered on members and nonmembers, not on specific issues or locations
of discourse. For recent literature on state formation, see Saul Cornell, The Other
Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The
Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997); Joanne B.
Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven,
CT, 2001); John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works
and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2001); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System
from Franklin to Morse (1995; repr., Cambridge, MA, 1998); and Simon
P. Newman, Parades and Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early
Republic (Philadelphia, PA, 1997).
4. On Virginia Baptists involvement in debates over church and state, see Thomas E.
Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776-1787 (Charlottesville,
VA, 1977), and Rhys Isaac, " 'The Rage of Malice of the Old Serpent Devil': The
Dissenters and the Making and Remaking of the Virginia Statute for Religious
Freedom," in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and
Consequences in American History, ed. Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan
(Cambridge, MA, 1988): 139-70.
5. James Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery,
1770-1808 (Philadelphia, PA, 1982) provides the most comprehensive study of this
topic. Essig finds a vital movement during the revolutionary era that combined evan-
gelical theology with a strain of republican ideology. Heyrman, however, argues that
evangelicals willingly sacrificed antislavery in order to secure greater respectability
within southern society, see Southern Cross, particularly 24,92-93,138, and 155. See
also Jewel Spangler, "Salvation was Not Liberty: Baptists and Slavery in
Revolutionary Virginia," American Baptist Quarterly 13 (1994): 221-23. For
Methodists and slavery, see Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind,
1770-1810 (New York, 1998); Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism: A
Chapter in American Morality, 1780-1845 (Princeton, NJ, 1965); and John H.
Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in
America (New York, 1998).
6. Minutes of the Baptist General Committee, May 1791, 8, 5 (Virginia Baptist
Historical Society, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA; hereafter VBHS).
7. Ibid., May 1790, 6-7.
8. Ibid., May 1791, 5, 4,8.
9. Records of the Strawberry Baptist Association (October 1787 to May 1822), May
1792 (Archives, Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA; hereafter LVA); Roanoke District
Baptist Association Minute Book (1789-1821), June 1790, LVA; Ketocton Baptist
Association Minutes, 1792, VBHS; (italics mine), Minutes of the Baptist General
Committee, Holden at Muddy-Creek Meeting-House: Powhatan County, Virginia.
May,1793 (Richmond, VA, 1793),4, VBHS.
68 Monica Najar

10. John Leland, "The Virginia Chronicle" in The Writings of the Late Elder John
Leland Including Some Events in his Life Written by Himself, ed. L. F. Greene
(New York, 1845), 95, 96, 96-97.
11. Minutes of the Virginia Portsmouth Baptist Association, 1796, 5, VBHS; Minutes of
the Kehukee Baptist Association, Holden at Parker's Meeting-House, on Meherrin,
Hertford County, North-Carolina, September, 1796 (Halifax, 1796), 4; Minutes of
the Ketocton Baptist Association Held at Thumb Run, Fauquier County, Virginia,
August 1796 (Dumfries, 1796), 4.
12. Minutes of the Virginia Portsmouth Baptist Association, May 17[9]3, 4, VBHS;
ibid., May 1792, 2. Barrow may have engaged in some devious actions here to give
his substitute query a public forum. The minutes from 1794 meeting indicate that the
representatives agreed that Barrow's substitute question was to be "expunged" from
the official records. However, Barrow, who was assigned to prepare the minutes,
neglected to remove his question. Minutes of the Virginia Portsmouth Baptist
Association, May 1794, 5, VBHS.
13. Forks of Elkhorn Baptist Church Minutes, Kentucky, 1788-1831, January 1806,
April 1806 (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY; hereafter SBTS);
"Minutes of the Proceeding of the Church at Waterlick (in Shenandoah County)
Consolidated on the Fifteenth of Apr. AD. 1787," August 13,1796, VBHS; South
Fork Baptist Church Minutes, December 19,1807, July, the third Sat., 1808, SBTS.
There were, of course, limits on laypeople's rights of participation that were only
extended in their fullest sense to white men. White women and African Americans
experienced various restrictions, yet could utilize "backdoor" opportunities to raise
a variety of issues. It was quite easy to instigate a disciplinary investigation, for
instance, which often led to full church debate.
14. When the majority of the churches sent word to the association that they rejected the
plan, it agreed to drop it. Minutes of the Ketocton Baptist Association, August 1798,
3-4 (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; hereafter VHS); Baptist Dover
Association held at Bestland Meeting-House, Essex County, Virginia, October 14th,
1797,4, VBHS; Carter Tarrant, A History of the Baptised Ministers and Churches in
Kentucky, &c. Friends to Humanity (Frankfort, KY, 1808), 15, 18,47 (Rare Book
Room, Library of Congress, Washington, DC). Robert Carter was heavily influenced
by Baptist antislavery beliefs as well as economic and political arguments when he
decided to gradually manumit his 422 slaves; he eventually left the Baptist faith and
became a Swedenborgian. Robert Baylor Semple, History of the Baptists in Virginia,
revised and extended by G. W. Beale, with Introduction by Joe M. King (1810
[1894]; repr., Lafayette, TN, 1976), 178. Jean Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A
Divided Spirit (Princeton, NJ, 1985); Hiram H. Hilty, Toward Freedom For All:
North Carolina Quakers and Slavery (Richmond, IN, 1984), 13-43; Mathews,
Slavery and Methodism, 3-26.
15. Ronald Hoffman, "The 'Disaffected' in the Revolutionary South" in The American
Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F.
Young (Dekalb, IL, 1976). "Diary of David Barrow of His Travel Thru Kentucky in
1795" 5 (typescript at North Carolina Baptist Historical Society, Wake Forest
University, Winston-Salem, NC); Carlos R. Allen, Jr., ed., "David Barrow's Circular
Letter of 1798" William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 20 (July 1963): 445.
16. Semple, History of the Baptists in Virginia, 182-83; Frank M. Masters, A History of
Baptists in Kentucky (Louisville, KY, 1953), 178; Joan Wells Coward, Kentucky in
the New Republic: The Process of Constitution Making (Lexington, KY, 1979),
Table 1, 37; Table 6, 63.
17. Six of the sixteen antislavery votes came from the ministers, the seventh minister,
David Rice, having resigned before the vote. Five of the remaining ten votes came
 "Meddling with Emancipation" 69

from active laymen in Baptist and Presbyterian churches. Coward, Kentucky in the
New Republic, 38, 36-38, 45; Lowell H. Harrison, Kentucky's Road to Statehood
(Lexington, KY, 1992), 103-11; "Minutes of the Elkhorn Baptist Association,
Kentucky, 1785-1805" in William Warren Sweet, ed., Religion on the American
Frontier: A Collection of Source Material, 1783-1830,4 vols. (New York, 1931), 1:
444. The following meeting was attended by many prominent emancipationists,
including George Stokes Smith, William Hickman, and James Garrad, but the fifteen
new representatives enabled enough of a shift that this meeting voted to "disapprove"
of the memorial. "Elkhorn Minutes" in Sweet, ed., Religion on the American
Frontier, 1: 447.
18. Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 107-09.
19. J. H. Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists From 1769 to 1885, 2 vols.
(Cincinnati, OH, 1885),2: 47; 2: 47-49, 1: 184.
20. Ibid., 1: 189; Minutes of the Elkhorn Association of Baptists, Began and held agreeable
to appointment, at David's Fork Meeting-House, State of Kentucky, the 2d Saturday
in August, 1807, 2 (Special Collections, Margaret I. King Library, University of
Kentucky, Lexington); Minutes of the North District Association of Baptists;
Held . .. the first Saturday in October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight
hundred and six, 3 (Special Collections, Margaret I. King Library, University of
Kentucky, Lexington); Ellen Eslinger, "The Beginnings of Afro-American
Christianity Among Kentucky Baptists" in The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the
Promised Land, ed. Craig Thompson Friend (Lexington, KY, 1999),203-6.
21. Allen, ed., "David Barrow's Circular Letter," 445, 450. See Baptist General
Committee, May 1790, 6; Portsmouth Baptist Association, May 17[9]3, 4;
Portsmouth Baptist Association, May 1794.
22. Minutes of the North District Association of Baptists . .. October 1805, 2, SBTS;
North District Association, October 1806, 3; North District Association, October
1805,5; North District Association, October 1806, 3.
23. South Fork Baptist Church Minutes, December 19, 1807, July, the third Sat., 1808,
SBTS; Tarrant, A History, 7. For more on Barrow, see Essig, The Bonds of
Wickedness, 74-78.
24. Forks of Elkhorn Church Minutes, January 1806, April 1806.
25. Ibid., May 1806; "Elkhorn Minutes" in Sweet, ed., Religion on the American
Frontier, 1: 508; Forks of Elkhorn Church Minutes, September 1807, August 1808,
January 1807, June 1806, December 1806, February 1807. For other members
expelled for nonattendance for unnamed reasons, see ibid., July 1807; October
1807, May 1808, June 1808, and July 1808.
26. "Minutes of the Baptized Licking-Locust Association, Friends of Humanity" in
Sweet, ed., Religion on the American Frontier, 1: 566-67, 567, 567-68, 568, 569.
27. Ibid., 1: 566-67, 568. Carter Tarrant, The Substance of a Discourse Delivered in the
Town of Versailles, Woodford County, State of Kentucky, April 20, 1806 (Lexington,
KY, 1806), 4-7, 32, 9; Tarrant, A History, 1, 42. See also Essig, The Bonds of
Wickedness, chap 4.
28. "Elkhorn Minutes" in Sweet, ed., Religion on the American Frontier, 1: 508. For
more on the construction of sacred and secular authority among the Baptists, see
Monica Najar, "Evangelizing the South: Gender, Race, and Politics in the Early
Evangelical South, 1765-1815" (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2000).
29. Spencer, A History of Kentucky Baptists, 1: 192-97; 1: 191-92; 2: 21-23; 1: 189-90;
1: 163; 1: 190; 1: 250; Sweet, ed., Religion on the American Frontier, 1: 570-72.
30. March 15, 1808, Kentucky Gazette and General Advertiser, Lexington, KY
(Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, KY); David Benedict, A General History of
the Baptist Denomination in America and Other Parts of the World, 2 vols.
70 Monica Najar

(Boston, MA, 1813), 2: 248; Mount Tabor Church Minutes, third Sat. in August
1810; third Sat. in October 1810; third Sat. in August 1812; third Sat. in February
1814 and third Sat. in April 1814. See also third Sat. in April 1813 and third Sat. in
April 1814. South Fork Baptist Church lost five men and ten women over slavehold-
ing; by 1812, four of the women and three of the men had returned, with the men
quickly returning to their positions of authority. South Fork Baptist Church, third
Sat. in July 1808, fourth Sat. in December 1811, fourth Sat. in February 1812, fourth
Sat. in March 1812, fourth Saturday in April 1812; fourth Sat. in July 1812; Spencer,
ed., A History of Kentucky Baptists, 1: 264; Forks of Elkhorn Church Minutes,
September 1807, November 1809, August 1812.
31. "Minutes of the Concord Baptist Association Held at Hopewell Meetinghouse Sumner
County West Tennessee Sept. 26,27 & 28th, 1812," 12 (Southern Baptist Historical
Library and Archives, Nashville, TN). See also Minutes, Tennessee Baptist Association,
1802-1932, October 1808, October 1810 (Southern Baptist Historical Library and
Archives, Nashville, TN); Forks of Elkhorn Church Minutes, January 1806, April
1806, and May 1806. For the continuation of this pattern through the antebellum
period, see Gregory A. Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church
Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900 (New York, 1997), chap 3.
 Chapter 3

The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark

Stephen Aron

From Southern California Quarterly

This essay maps the fall and rise of Lewis and Clark by exploring what
happened to the explorers following the return of the Corps of Discovery to
St. Louis in September 1806. Charting the personal descent of Meriwether
Lewis and the political undoing of William Clark, the article ties the sad fate
of the coca pta ins to the far sadder fate of race relations on the American
frontier. Turning, then, from the lives of Lewis and Clark after the expedi-
tion to their afterlives, it tracks how, in the years since the deaths of Lewis
and Clark, Americans have forgotten and now remember them, how the
cocaptains have been joined by Sacagawea and York in the American
imagination, and what this resurrection tells us about them-and us.
As historical celebrities go, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are as
hot as they come right now. Fifteen years ago, Lewis and Clark placed
seventh in a survey of the collective memory of Americans about pre-Civil
War historical figures. If that survey were taken again today, the duo would
surely rank even higher. In recent years, Time magazine featured Lewis and
Clark on its cover, and they have been the subject of the biggest of big screen
treatments in an IMAX film. In the fall of 2003, the Autry National Center
staged scenes from "Lewis and Clark: The Musical," which, if all goes
according to plan, will premiere on Broadway in the not-too-distant future.
There, it may compete with "Lewis and Clark: The Opera," a production of
the St. Louis Opera Company. St. Louis is also the site at which the Official
National Bicentennial Exhibition opened to overflowing crowds in the
winter of 2004. What is surprising, given the public's fascination with all
things Lewis and Clark, is that no major motion picture is under development.
Thus, it appears that movie fans will still have only "The Far Horizon,"
starring Fred McMurray as Meriwether Lewis, Charlton Heston as William
72 Stephen Aron

Clark, and that famous American Indian actress Donna Reed as

Sacagawea. 1
If movie makers have missed their opportunity, merchandisers have not.
Consumers have an astonishing array of Lewis and Clark commodities from
which to choose. T-shirts abound, including my favorite, which carries the
slogan "Lewis and Clark: The original guys that didn't need directions." At
the gift shop for the Autry National Center's Museum of the American
West, several shelves of wares tempt customers, who can select among
Lewis and Clark coins, "authentic" foods from the journey, Corps of
Discovery playing cards, Trail West jigsaw puzzles, action figures, and
Sacagawea dolls. Most of all, there are books, probing the Lewis and Clark
expedition from seemingly every conceivable angle and for all ages. There
are, for example, a number of new Lewis and Clark cookbooks-presumably
essential for those who purchase Lewis and Clark foods. For wilderness
enthusiasts eager to follow in the Corps of Discovery's footsteps, there are a
variety of guide books. Recently published biographies of Lewis and Clark,
of the other men in the Corps, and of Sacagawea spill off the shelves. Lest
animal lovers feel left out, Lewis's dog, Seaman, has been the subject of
several tomes (figure 3.1). And all of this merchandise and all of these
publications have appeared before the actual bicentennial of the exploration
commences! Two hundred years after Thomas Jefferson instructed
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to go forth "for the purposes of
commerce," it seems that they have fulfilled their mission. 2
That aura of commercial success has not always enveloped Lewis and
Clark. True, the Corps of Discovery received a hero's welcome when it
arrived back in St. Louis in 1806. Residents ran to the shoreline to cheer the
members of the expedition, then sang songs in their honor and feted them in
their homes. The high note continued for several months. Through the fall
of 1806 and winter of 1807, newspapers across the country celebrated
the journey's completion. President Thomas Jefferson, who had author-
ized the expedition and provided the explorers with their instructions,
exulted that "never did a similar event excite more joy through the United
States" than did the homecoming of Lewis and Clark. Soon after their
return to St. Louis, Jefferson appointed Lewis governor of the Louisiana
Territory. A week later, William Clark got his reward, accepting an appoint-
ment as brigadier general of the territorial militia and its superintendent of
Indian affairs. For the thirty-two-year-old Lewis and the thirty-six-year-old
Clark, these were heady days, with the rest and seemingly best of their lives
ahead of them. But happily ever after is not how their postexpedition
careers played out. For Lewis, the aftermath of the expedition turned
quickly to personal and political despair, culminating in his premature death
in 1809. For Clark, the fall was not nearly so calamitous, but in the last
thirty years of his life, he suffered a crushing political defeat, provoked the
poisoning of his relationship with his slave and fellow explorer York, and
participated in a transformation of American-Indian relations that in many
ways undid the promise of the Lewis and Clark expedition. So undone were
 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 73

Figure 3.1 Epitomizing the new "feel good version of the Lewis and Clark saga, this toy
features Lewis's dog Seaman at the bow of a canoe with Clark, Sacagawea, York, and Lewis.
Source: Stephen Aron.

these promises that the Lewis and Clark expedition faded into relative
obscurity in the years after Clark's death. Only in the last few years of the
twentieth century were Lewis and Clark resurrected and placed at the center
of a new, "feel good" frontier history.3

* * *
Contrary to their current acclaimed status, the glow about Lewis and Clark
subsided shortly after their journey's end. In part, the problem was that the
mission did not fulfill jefferson's instructions, or at least what the Corps dis-
covered did not meet Jefferson's hopes. First and foremost, Thomas
Jefferson had directed the explorers to find "the most direct and practicable
water communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce."
Although Lewis and Clark thought they had done this, their tortuous route
up the Missouri and over the Bitterroot Mountains to the Columbia was not
the Northwest Passage of Jefferson's dreams, nor was their trail a viable
highway for large volume trade or human transportation. In fact, what
74 Stephen Aron

Lewis and Clark found out about the North American West blasted
Jefferson's Enlightenment expectations about continental geography.
Instead of a symmetrical design, in which West mimicked East, Lewis and
Clark learned that the Missouri did not mirror the Ohio and that the
Rockies were far more difficult to cross than the Appalachians. In the wake
of Lewis and Clark's expedition, the illusion of the Rockies as a single ridge,
which typified wishful imaginations about North American geography, dis-
appeared from maps of North America. But what good was this negative
knowledge, especially as the bills for the exploration came due? The ulti-
mate cost of Lewis and Clark's journey has been estimated at $40,000. That
exceeded the initial appropriation of $2,500 by 3,000 percent, and it gave
Jefferson's political opponents grounds on which to attack the expedition
and the expenditure as wasteful and worthless. 4
More immediate were the local political problems that burdened Lewis
and Clark. Governing the vast Louisiana Territory was, as Lewis soon
learned, a tougher task than commanding the Corps of Discovery. In both
endeavors, Lewis had to lead a diverse assortment of people. But as gover-
nor, his authority was more contested, and the often conflicting interests of
the territory's colonists-who were divided between long-settled French-
speaking farmers, creole fur traders based primarily in St. Louis, and more
recent waves of American emigrants-made governing a trial. Adding to
Lewis's difficulties was the very limited budget that the federal government
granted him, and the constant demands that his superiors made for still
greater economy.5
For Lewis and also for Clark, the most pressing problems were traceable
to the management of Indian affairs. Here, in contrast with their lack of
experience in the general administration of territorial governance, Lewis
and Clark seemed exceptionally well prepared. During their expedition, the
captains had largely fulfilled Jefferson's dictum that in their "intercourse
with the natives," they should "treat them in the most friendly and concilia-
tory manner which their own conduct will permit." Although much has
been made of the education that Lewis received before the expedition from
his mentor and from the nation's leading scientists and scholars, the
mission's diplomatic successes owed less to information gleaned in
Jefferson's library or in Philadelphia salons than to lessons from French
traders in St. Louis and mitis members of the corps. From these sources,
Lewis and Clark learned the importance of respecting the rules and rituals
of Indian diplomacy and exchange. Consequently, Lewis and Clark brought
a supply of peace medals to bestow upon native leaders and, in St. Louis,
they bought additional commodities to give as presents. The encounters they
had during the twenty-nine-month excursion reinforced these precepts and
protocols. As Clark discerned, "it requires time and a little smoking with the
Indians, if you wish to have peace with them" and [he might have added] if
you wish to conduct trade with them. 6 That Lewis and Clark had mostly
peaceful encounters with Indians traced as well to relations fashioned
outside formal councils, to the more intimate diplomatic intercourse that
 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 75

occurred between the men in the Corps of Discovery and diverse Indian
women. To be sure, the men who participated in this intercourse did not
often think themselves diplomats. Nor did Lewis (who likely abstained) or
Clark (who was rumored to have fathered a child by a Nez Perce woman)
appreciate the diplomatic character of sexual contacts between their men
and Indian women. Raised to believe that all Indian women were "squaw
drudges," the captains viewed sexual advances by Indian women as solici-
tations from "lechous" and "lude" prostitutes. What Lewis and Clark could
not grasp was the status that Indian women held in many native societies as
principal agriculturalists or the powers they acquired through sexual con-
tact with outsiders. In part, the gains were material; as sexual partners,
Indian women secured favorable access for themselves and their kin to trade
goods. Equally important were the spiritual powers transmitted through
copulation and, in turn, transmittable to Indian partners. 7
For reasons, then, that Lewis and Clark did not themselves fully under-
stand, as the Corps of Discovery made its way across the continent, the
American emissaries managed to stay on the good side of most of the Indians
through whose countries they traveled. As Meriwether Lewis wrote near the
end of the two-and-a half-year odyssey, "so long have our men been accus-
tomed to a friendly intercourse with the natives, that we find it difficult to
impress on their minds the necessity of always being on guard with rispect
[sic] to them." Therein lay the promise of the Lewis and Clark expedition
that American expansion might be accomplished through friendly intercourse
with the natives. 8
For the most part, amicable relations between Native Americans and
Europeans had also prevailed in and around St. Louis, especially so long as
fur trading interests were in control of that town and its commercial hinter-
lands. Thus, during the 1790s, even the emigration of various eastern Indian
groups, principally Shawnees and Delawares, and the first wave of
American colonists from the Ohio Valley, the most famous of whom was
Daniel Boone, did not disturb the peace. To the contrary, although these
same Indians and Americans had turned the Ohio Valley into a dark and
bloody ground, the former enemies coexisted quite harmoniously while
establishing new settlements along the middle Mississippi and lower
Missouri rivers. Indeed, in their joint pioneering into what was still Spanish
territory, both Indians and Americans had developed novel arrangements,
blending material cultures, subsistence systems, and common landscapes, and
joining together to hunt, race horses, gamble, drink, and dance. As among the
French colonists in the region, marital unions sometimes facilitated this easy
familiarity and peopled a still-melting pot with mixed-ancestry children. 9
But the transfer of Louisiana to the United States and the continuing
influx of American settlers compounded the challenges for territorial offi-
cials. Initially, Thomas Jefferson had contemplated transferring populations
to separate Indians and whites. Under this scheme, French and American
colonists living on the western side of the Mississippi would exchange their
lands for holdings in the Ohio Valley, while eastern Indians would relocate
76 Stephen Aron

to the Missouri River Valley. This plan, however, met resistance from all
parties, and Jefferson had neither the money nor the manpower to enforce
the transfer of peoples and the restriction of movement. "Nothing but a cor-
don of troops will restrain our people from going over the [Mississippi]
River and settling themselves down upon the western bank" was the judg-
ment of Massachusetts Senator Rufus King. Bowing to political reality,
Jefferson retreated from his plan, and Americans continued to move across
the Mississippi in an unregulated fashion, squatting on whatever lands they
deemed vacant. 10
To stem encroachments onto their lands, the Osages, long the most
powerful nation in the lower Missouri Valley, struck out against trespassers.
By 1808, depredations attributed to the Osages led Governor Lewis to
declare the nation beyond the protection of the United States and to recall
traders from among them. Following Jefferson's views, Lewis believed "the
policy of withholding merchandise" superior to "the chastisement of the
sword." Deprived of trade goods, the Osages would, in Lewis's view, soon
seek peace and the resumption of the trade on which they had grown
dependent. In this case, he was proven right when several Osage leaders sig-
naled their desire to negotiate. Accordingly, William Clark headed up the
Missouri again, this time to construct a fort in the heart of Osage country
and to broker a treaty with Osage headmen. The resulting compact saw the
Osages cede much of their claims to all but the western parts of Missouri
and Arkansas. Trade resumed, and peace, if not good feelings, was restored,
at least for the moment. Privately, William Clark expressed concerns about
his part in this transfer of land from the Osages to the United States. It was,
he later acknowledged, "the hardest treaty" that he ever made. Indeed, he
confided that if he were "damned hereafter, it would be for making" the
1808 treaty with the Osages.H
Clearing Osage claims opened land not only for white American pioneers
but also for those whom Lewis described as "intimately friendly Indians."
These were the Shawnees and Delawares of the lower Missouri valley,
whose relations with American neighbors in the Louisiana Territory had
been startlingly convivial. As Clark recorded, the Shawnees and Delawares
were "peaceable and well disposed" peoples who had been "of great service
to our frontier settlements." But the continuing influx of newcomers from
Kentucky and Tennessee placed more and more squatters on Shawnee and
Delaware lands and built pressure for their dispossession. One solution,
favored by both Lewis and Clark, was to convince the Shawnees and
Delawares to sell these lands in exchange for those made available by the
recent Osage cession. 12
At this point, though both Lewis and Clark encouraged the Shawnees
and Delawares to leave their lands, they refused to force them out. When
Shawnees and Delawares balked at trading current tracts for lands given up
by the Osages, Governor Lewis courageously rebuffed demands from white
pioneers that he unilaterally compel the Indians to move. Quite the opposite,
Lewis responded to protests from Shawnee and Delaware villagers by
 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 77

issuing a proclamation in April 1809. In this manifesto, he ordered the white

intruders off Indian lands, lest "the peace and tranquility so happily subsisting
between the United States and those tribes be wantonly interrupted."13
Lewis's edict contained more bark than bite (figure 3.2). Just as Jefferson
could not keep Americans from crossing the Mississippi, so Lewis could not
prevent their trespasses on Shawnee and Delaware claims. Ineffectual
though it was, Lewis's stand further alienated him from a citizenry already
angry about the failings of his administration. Indeed, during the last

Figure 3.2 Portrait of Meriwether Lewis by Charles Willson Peale, from life, 1807.
Source: Independence National Historical Park.
78 Stephen Aron

months of his life, Lewis became an increasingly unpopular figure in the

territory. Embarking in September 1809 on what was to be his final trip
east, Lewis had, according to the Secretary of the Territory, "fallen from the
Public esteem & almost into the public contempt."14
On September 4, 1809, just short of three years since his triumphant
return with the Corps of Discovery, Meriwether Lewis set off from
St. Louis. No cheering, singing crowds sent him on his way, and he never
reached his destination. On October 10, 1809, Lewis met his end in central
Tennessee. For nearly two centuries, the mysterious circumstances sur-
rounding Lewis's death have stirred some controversy. Was he murdered?
Possibly, but far more likely, the gunshots that killed Lewis were fired by his
own hand. Earlier in this his final journey, he had been drinking heavily, and
he may have attempted to commit suicide. Tellingly, when his closest friends
heard about Lewis's demise, they accepted that he had taken his own life.
"I fear this report has too much truth" was William Clark's initial reaction
to a report that his despondent comrade had killed himself. IS

* * *
Lewis's probable suicide cost the Shawnees and Delawares a valuable
ally; the outbreak of the War of 1812 made their hold on lands in the ter-
ritory even more fragile(figure 3.3). Ironically, this weakening occurred
despite the continuing loyalty of these Shawnees and Delawares to the
United States. During the war, Shawnees in the Missouri Valley resisted
efforts by their tribal brother Tecumseh to join in a pan-Indian, anti-
American crusade. Nonetheless, the raids of other Indians against
American settlements along the lower Missouri led to calls for indiscrim-
inate vengeance. All too typical was the sentiment of a St. Louis resident
who recommended "slaying every Indian from here to the Rocky
Mountains." 16
Against this tide stood William Clark, who in 1813 added the office of
territorial governor to his duties as the superintendent of Indian affairs. To
be sure, in protecting the Shawnees and Delawares, Clark was partially
motivated by expediency. Facing a difficult military situation, he recognized
that the "Missouri Tribes must either be engaged for us; or they will be
opposed to us without doubt." And yet, Clark did not forget the services of
allied Indians. After the war, Governor Clark issued a proclamation that
echoed Lewis's earlier one. The intrusion of white persons on Indian lands
"in violation of laws and disregard of the executive authority of the
territory ... can no longer be permitted." The government, Clark declared
in 1815, must run off white squatters. In other words, while his constituents
cried for punishment against all Indians, Clark tried to protect at least some
of them. Needless to say, that was not a recipe for popularity for Clark,
who, especially in the postwar period, found himself caught between the
increasingly irreconcilable demands of settlers, Indians, and the federal
government. I?
 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 79

Figure 3.3 Portrait of William Clark by Charles Willson Peale, from life, 1807-1808.
Source: Independence National Historical Park.

After the war, a flood of new settlers moved to the lower Missouri Valley
in search of farmland. In these years, farmers decisively supplanted fur
traders as the dominant group in what had become the Territory of
Missouri. Where fur traders depended on the goodwill and labor of Indian
hunters and trappers, farmers demanded only land from Indians. As the
population of Missouri skyrocketed in the years after 1815, it also graduated
to higher stages of territorial government, which meant more local control.
And here, demography and democracy doomed the Indians of Missouri, as
well as those public officials who were seen as sympathetic to them. "Clark
80 Stephen Aron

is too good to the Indians," summarized one of the growing number of his
critics. Already in 1816, a prominent Missourian estimated that "nine-tenths"
of the territory's citizens no longer wanted Clark as governor. That year, the
territorial Assembly, which, unlike the governorship, was popularly elected,
undermined Clark's proclamation. The Assembly petitioned the United
States Congress to guarantee the improvements made by white squatters
and remove Shawnee and Delaware claimants to unoccupied lands to
the west. 18
For Clark, the cheers that had greeted him upon his return to St. Louis in
1806 had long since dissipated. When, on the eve of statehood, the gover-
norship of Missouri became an elective office, Clark stood for office,
expecting that his heroic accomplishments and his long public service would
guarantee him election. Political opponents, however, stepped up their
charges against Clark's too friendly intercourse with Indians. Adversaries
spread rumors that Clark had fathered a child by an Indian woman. On
election day in August 1820, Clark was swamped, losing by a better than
two-to-one margin. 19
Clark's electoral downfall did not end his government service. He soon
won reappointment as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, overseeing rela-
tions with tribes across the Upper Mississippi and Missouri valleys. True to
the convictions that had contributed to his electoral defeat, Clark remained
a foe of squatters who illegally occupied Indian lands. In the spring of 1824,
in response to continuing incursions, he determined that whites "settled on
lands designed for the Delawares and Shawnees will be required to
remove." Those words sounded very much like the proclamation he had
issued in 1815, suggesting that Clark's views had not changed. 20
Or had they? Barely eighteen months after his latest defense of Shawnee
claims, Clark affixed his signature to a treaty by which those same
Shawnees relinquished their lands near Cape Girardeau. In exchange for
giving up their Spanish grant, the Shawnees received $14,000 and a tract
near the junction of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, just beyond the west-
ern border of the state of Missouri. And this pact was no aberration. If the
1808 treaty with the Osages was the "hardest" one he made, compelling
land concessions from Indians became much easier for Clark, especially dur-
ing the 1820s and 1830s. In all, he signed thirty-seven treaties with Indians,
far more than any other agent. With those secured by his direct subordinates
included in the total, Clark had a hand in more than 20 percent of all of the
ratified treaties between the United States and Indian nations. Taken
together, Clark's treaties dispossessed tens of thousands of Indians from
hundreds of thousands of acres, and, as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, he
oversaw a policy of forced removals that amounted to state-sponsored
"ethnic cleansing." Certainly, Clark's conduct seemed very distant from the
"friendly intercourse" that had characterized relations between Indians and
the Corps of Discovery.21
In part, changing times explained Clark's changing views. Accepting the
inevitability of Indian removal, he reasoned that since "the Government will
 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 81

sooner or later have to do this ... the sooner it was done the better." Delay
would only increase "the difficulties of purchasing" Indian lands and
deepen the dissatisfactions among those forced to abandon their improve-
ments. The challenge facing Clark during the 1820s was to make removal as
orderly as possible. Accordingly, in June 1829, Clark once more decried
"the encroachment of the whites" onto "that part of Shawnee lands yet
remaining on White River." By this time, however, Clark's "regret" was not
the trespassings themselves. What upset Clark was that the incursions inter-
fered with the efficient execution of "the removal of those Indians," which
"would most probably have been effected in the course of the next year. "22
Before damning Clark for betraying the promise of the Lewis and Clark
expedition or for bowing to political realities, his actions and his ideas
should be put in context. That Clark concluded so many pacts attested to
the trust that so many Indians retained in him. In an era in which his com-
patriots called for "slaying every Indian from here to the Rocky
Mountains," Clark remained committed to protecting the welfare of Native
Americans. If Clark used military force-or the threat of military force-to
discipline Indian groups deemed hostile to the United States, he insisted that
peaceable peoples be treated humanely. "In my present situation of
Superintendent of Indian Affairs," wrote Clark to Jefferson in 1825, "it
would afford me pleasure to be enabled to meliorate the condition of those
unfortunate people placed under my charge, knowing as I do their
[w]retchedness and their rapid decline."23
Clark justified removal as the most compassionate policy left to him and
for Indians. In the mid-1820s, he explained that the changing circumstances
of Indians now necessitated their departure "from within the limits of the
States." With the Indians' power "broken, their warlike spirit subdued, and
themselves sunk into objects of pity and commiseration ... justice and
humanity require us to cherish and befriend them." That entailed trans-
planting them to a country "where they could rest in peace," by which he
did not mean, as some other Americans wished, they would go to die.
Rather, Clark held on to the belief that, given time and proper instruction,
Indians might yet be fully incorporated into the American republic. These
hopes were a rhetorical commonplace among Jacksonian champions of
removal. The difference was that Clark genuinely believed that if Indians
were "kept close to [agricultural] work and dissuaded from hunting as
much as possible," they could become like white Americans. To that end,
Clark understood that removal imposed an obligation on the government of
the United States "to teach them to live in houses, to raise grain and stock,
to plant orchards, to set up landmarks, to divide their possessions, to establish
laws for their government, [and] to get the rudiments of common learning,
such as reading, writing, and ciphering." Assimilating Indians also required
that the government shield them from pernicious influences. 24
Among the influences from which Clark wished to isolate Indians were
unregulated and unscrupulous traders. At one point, he proposed that a
thirty-year transition period be established in which the Indians would be
82 Stephen Aron

completely sequestered from all traders. Instead, all intercourse would con-
tinue to be conducted through government-run factories, which would
insure that Indians were not ripped off by price-gouging merchants. After
Congress closed government-operated posts in the early 1820s, Clark advo-
cated strict regulation of traders to prevent their taking advantage of
Indians. 25
These ideas about commerce were increasingly anachronistic, as was
Clark's position on the assimilability of Indians. No doubt, his views made
him unelectable and cost him considerable popularity. Yet, when Clark died
in 1838, the glories of his life were ardently recalled. Hundreds of mourners
gathered at the home of his son Meriwether Lewis Clark. Thousands poured
onto the streets of St. Louis for the funeral procession. "The name of
GOVERNOR CLARK must ever occupy a prominent place on the pages of
the history of this country," a Missouri newspaper eulogized. 26

* * *
The names of both Clark and Lewis, however, became ever less prominent
on the pages of nineteenth-century histories. By the mid- and late 1800s,
school primers devoted little space to the Corps of Discovery. Other explor-
ers enjoyed far more renown. The rediscovery of Lewis and Clark happened
primarily not in the first century after their expedition, but over the last one
hundred years. The centennial of the expedition in the early twentieth
century brought major expositions in St. Louis and Portland that saluted the
Lewis and Clark expedition and tied its success to the story of American
progress. In these centennial celebrations, Sacagawea and York gained a
new prominence. She especially was featured in plays, books, magazine
articles, and statues. 27
During the run-up to the expedition's bicentennial, the cult of Lewis and
Clark grew larger, and the spotlight on Sacagawea grew brighter. Yet for all
the attention that has been focused on her, much about her biography
remains uncertain. Where she was born and what she looked like still sum-
mon no definitive answers. Her name, too, is the source of continuing
debate. In the expedition's journals, she is mentioned more than one hundred
times, but only eleven times is she named-ten times by some spelling of
Sacagawea and once by Clark as "Janey." Today, various pronunciations of
Sacagawea compete, with different ways of saying her name connoting dif-
ferent meanings and different stories about her life before encountering
Lewis and Clark. Uncertainties about her name and her biography get even
more tangled when considering what happened to Sacagawea after she
parted ways with Lewis and Clark. According to written records, including
Clark's, which historians have generally accepted, Sacagawea died of a
"putrid fever" in 1812. But native oral traditions, which historians have
now come to see as equally plausible, tell of an eventful and extended life.
In these stories, Sacagawea took on the name Porivo and did not meet her
end until 1884. 28
 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 83

Although the riddles of her life, particularly of her life after the expedi-
tion, will likely never be resolved, the search for Sacagawea continues to
occupy researchers and inspire new publications. Indeed, in recent versions
of the Lewis and Clark myth, Sacagawea has become almost as prominent
as the cocaptains of the expedition, and, in her afterlife, she has emerged as
the most famous of American Indians. Until the last few years, when I asked
students to name the Indians whose names come first to mind, their answers
were Geronimo, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse. These were warriors, whose
reputation rested on having catalyzed militant resistance to American
expansion. Now almost always, students cite Pocahontas (they did grow up
watching the Disney movie) or Sacagawea.
What should we make of the shift in gender and in the reconfiguration of
intercultural relations that my students' choices suggest? In Disney's
Pocahontas and in the Sacagawea of our new dollar coin, we undoubtedly
locate a softer past. We reveal a preference for an alternative frontier
process in which Indian-American relations were defined not by destructive
conquest, but by a kinder, gentler history of peaceful accommodations and
mutual acculturations.
The same wishes explain why York has moved from the edges to the
center of the myth of Lewis and Clark. As with Sacagawea, the journals of
the Corps provide numerous references to York, but they give him no voice
of his own. That, however, has not stopped interpreters from seeking York
and speaking for him. In the new, "feel good" version of the Lewis and Clark
story, attention focuses on the moment when the Corps, having reached the
Pacific Ocean, had to decide on which bank of the Columbia River to situate
their winter camp. In a seeming departure from military hierarchy, Lewis and
Clark opted to leave the matter to a ballot of the entire Corps. That York was
given a vote has been depicted as a reflection of the cocaptains' liberalism,
suggestive of an equality that York supposedly enjoyed during the expedi-
tion. No wonder the creators of "Lewis and Clark: The Musical," seeking a
happy ending for their production, made this moment the final scene.
In fact, such an interpretation drastically overstretches the evidence of
York's treatment on the journey and stands in sharp contrast with his
postexpedition fate. As with Sacagawea, what happened to York after the
exploration remains in some dispute. Very questionable is a newly published
article that dates York's death to 1879. More plausible, though impossible to
verify, was the story told by fur trader Zenas Leonard, who claimed to have
met a black man in 1832 living among Crow Indians in what is today northern
Wyoming. According to Leonard, the man introduced himself as York. 29
What is no longer in dispute is York's continuing slavery after the Corps
of Discovery returned to St. Louis. To later interviewers, Clark intimated
that he had emancipated York upon the completion of the journey, a story that
makes a fitting conclusion to the "feel good" story and seems true to the sup-
posedly egalitarian spirit of the West Coast vote. Yet newly discovered-and
now published-letters from William Clark to his brother Jonathan
contradict this uplifting ending. From these letters, we learn that Clark
84 Stephen Aron

rejected York's plea for freedom on the basis of his participation in the
expedition. Instead, Clark decided that his slave's "services" had not "been
so great." Rather than emancipation, Clark required that York stay in
St. Louis. Thus separated from his wife in Louisville, York, in Clark's words,
turned "insolent and sulky." Repeatedly, Clark complained about York's
attitude. On more than one occasion, he gave his slave a "trouncing." Clark
also worried that York was planning to run away. Should York have tried or
should he have continued "to refuse to" perform "his duty as a Slave,"
Clark would have him "[slold, or hired out to Some Severe master until he
thinks better of Such Conduct. "30
York escaped being sold down river. Some time after the War of 1812, he
gained his freedom and returned to Kentucky. From there however, the trail
of York gets much harder to follow. But what we know of York's life after
the journey deprives us of the good feelings that have surrounded the
expedition and its aftermath. Still, it is easy to see why we are so attached to
versions of the Lewis and Clark expedition in which York enjoys equality
and Sacagawea mediates peace between Indians and Americans. In York's
elevation from slave to Corps member, we escape the brutality of bondage
and enter what appears to be a far more humane interracial landscape.
Likewise, we are captivated by stories of the captive Indian woman
Sacagawea because, through her, we glimpse a past about which we can be
truly proud. In that sense, the feel-good myth of the Lewis and Clark epic
tells us less about who we were or who we are than it does about whom we
would like to be.
Maybe, though, we should be satisfied with who they were. Yes, this
review of the postexpedition careers of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
shows that the cocaptains shared the racial attitudes of their time. But it also
highlights the uncommon principles that the expedition's principals demon-
strated as government officials. Their defense of Indian rights was not all we
might have wanted, but it did injure both Lewis and Clark politically. Surely,
we can appreciate how in sacrificing popularity they manifested a "courage
undaunted" that matched their accomplishments as explorers.

Notes
Stephen Aron, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and exec-
utive director of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National
Center, is a specialist in frontier and western American history. He is author of How the
West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay
(1996) and American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border
State (2005), and coauthor of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern
World from the Mongol Empire to the Present (2002).
1. For survey, see Jay H. Buckley, "William Clark: Superintendent of Indian Affairs at
St. Louis, 1813-1838" (PhD Dissertation, University of Nebraska, 2001), 1; Time,
July 8, 2002. Carolyn Gilman, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), is a superb catalogue for the Bicentennial
Exhibition.
 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 85

2. The book whose sales best attest to the public's fascination with the expedition is
Stephen Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and
the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). I have
reviewed a number of the more recent books in "Rediscovering Lewis and Clark,"
Convergence 1 (Summer 2004): 12-15.
3. Jefferson quoted in Betty Houchin Winfield, "Public Perception of the Expedition," in
Alan Taylor, ed., Lewis and Clark: Journey to Another America (St. Louis: Missouri
Historical Society Press, 2003), 187. A report on the reception given to Lewis and
Clark on their return to St. Louis appeared in the Frankfort, Kentucky, newspaper,
The Western World on October 11, 1806, and is reprinted in James P. Ronda, ed.,
Voyages of Discovery: Essays on the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Helena, MT:
Montana Historical Society Press, 1998),203-05.
4. Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, June 20, 1803, in Gunther Barth, ed., The
Lewis and Clark Expedition: Selections from the Journals Arranged by Topic (Boston,
MA: Bedford, 1998), quotation on 18; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the
Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
1999), 266; James P. Ronda, Finding the West: Explorations with Lewis and Clark
(Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 12; Donald Jackson,
Thomas Jefferson and the Stony Mountains: Exploring the West from Monticello
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981).
5. I discuss the political situation that Lewis confronted in the Louisiana Territory in detail
in Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to
Border State (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005), chapter 4.
6. Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, June 20,1803, in Barth, ed., The Lewis and
Clark Expedition, quotation on 20; Clark quoted in Buckley, "William Clark," 113.
On the education of Lewis and Clark and their reeducation from St. Louis merchants,
see James Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1984), 1-16; John Logan Allen, "Imagining the West: The View from
Monticello," in James P. Ronda, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West
(Albuquerque, NM and St. Louis, MO: University of New Mexico Press and Missouri
Historical Society Press, 1997), 3-23; William E. Foley, "The Lewis and Clark
Expedition's Silent Partners: The Chouteau Brothers of St. Louis," Missouri Historical
Review 77 (January 1983): 131-146; William E. Foley and C. David Rice, The First
Choteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
1983),89-96.
7. Carolyn Gilman, "A World of Women," Gateway Heritage, 24 (Fall 2003-Winter
2004), quotation on 46; Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians, 36-37, 62-64,
106-07,208-10,232-33. For a Nez Perce version of the Lewis and Clark expedition,
including details about William Clark's reputed offspring, see "William Clark's Nez
Perce Son: A Tsoopnitpeloo Legend As Told by Otis Halfmoon of the Nez Perce
Tribe," Discovering Lewis and Clark: A Legacy Website, http://www.lewis-clark.orgl
index.htm (accessed November 14, 2006).
8. Meriwether Lewis, February 20, 1806, in Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition, 13 vols. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
1983-2001), quotation on 6: 331.
9. For the furthering of this process of cultural borrowings between Indians and
Anglo-Americans in the Ohio Valley, see Stephen Aron, "Pigs and Hunters:
'Rights in the Woods' on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier," in Andrew R. L.
Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the
Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 1998), 175-204; Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost:
The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore,
86 Stephen Aron

MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1-57, 102-23. And for the fruition
of these developments in the lower Missouri Valley, see John Mack Faragher,
"'More Motley Than Mackinaw': From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on
the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783-1833," in Cayton and Teute, eds.,
Contact Points, 304-26.
10. Rufus King to Christopher Gore, September 6, 1803, in Charles R. King, ed., The
Life and Correspondence of Rufus King, 6 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1897), quotation on 4:303; William E. Foley, "James A. Wilkinson: Territorial
Governor," Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 25 (October 1968): 14-15;
Bernard Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American
Indian (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1973),245-50.
11. Meriwether Lewis to Thomas Jefferson, December 15, 1808, McCarter & English
Indian Claim Cases, Mudd Library, Princeton University, Box 18, Folder 4,
Exhibit 144 (quotation); Clark quoted inJ. Frederick Fausz, "Becoming 'a Nation
of Quakers': The Removal of the Osage Indians from Missouri," Gateway
Heritage 21 (Summer 2000): 37; William Clark to the Secretary of War,
September 23, 1808, in Clarence E. Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the
United States: Volume 14: The Territory of Louisiana-Missouri, 1803-1806
(Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1948), 224;
Jerome O. Steffen, William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on The Frontier (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 64-65. The full text of the 1808 treaty is in
Kate L. Gregg, ed., Westward with Dragoons: The Journal of William Clark on
His Expedition to Establish Fort Osage, August 25 to September 22, 1808
(Fulton, MO: Ovid Bell Press, 1937), 64-68.
12. Lewis quoted in Lynn Morrow, "Trader William Gilliss and Delaware Migration in
Southern Missouri," Missouri Historical Review 75 (January 1981): 151; William
Clark to James Madison, April 10, 1811, in Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the
United States: Volume 14, quotation on 445.
13. Proclamation by Governor Lewis, April 6, 1809, in Carter, ed., The Territorial
Papers of the United States: Volume 14, quotation on 261.
14. Frederick Bates to Richard Bates, July 14, 1809, in Thomas Maitland Marshall, ed.,
The Life and Papers of Frederick Bates, 2 vols. (St. Louis, MO: Missouri Historical
Society, 1926), quotation on 2: 68.
15. William Clark to Jonathan Clark, October 28, 1809, in James J. Holmberg, ed.,
Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2002), quotation on 216; Gary E. Moulton, "Meriwether Lewis,"
in Christensen, et aI., eds., Dictionary of Missouri Biography (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 1999), 486; Paul Aron, Unsolved Mysteries of
American History (New York: J. Wiley, 1997), 79-84; Kathryn Moore, "The Lost
Years of Meriwether Lewis," Journal of the West 42 (Summer 2003): 62-65.
Although suicide is currently the dominant view of Lewis's death, see J. Frederick
Fausz and Michael A. Gavin, "The Death of Meriwether Lewis: An Unsolved
Mystery," Gateway Heritage 24 (Fa1l2003-Winter 2004): 66-79, for an interrogation
of the evidence that suggests the case should not yet be considered closed.
16. Christian Wilt to Joseph Hertzog, August 6, 1814, Christian Wilt, Letterbook, War
of 1812 Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis (quotation).
17. William Clark to the Secretary of War, August 20, 1814, in Carter, ed., The
Territorial Papers of the United States: Volume 14, quotation on 786; Governor
William Clark, A Proclamation, December 4, 1815, in Clarence E. Carter, ed., The
Territorial Papers of the United States: Volume 15: The Territory of Louisiana-
Missouri, 1815-1821 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office,
1951), quotation on 192.
 The Afterlives of Lewis and Clark 87

18. Buckley, "William Clark," quotation on 143; John G. Heath to Frederick Bates,
January 14, 1816, in Marshall, ed., The Life and Papers of Frederic Bates, quotation
on 2: 297; Resolutions of the Territorial Assembly, January 22, 1816: To the
Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America
in Congress, in Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States: Volume 15,
106-107; Resolutions of the Territorial Assembly Referred, January 24, 1817:
Resolutions Concerning the Indian Title in the Counties of St. Genevieve and Cape
Gerardeau, in ibid., 235.
19. William E. Foley, "After the Applause: William Clark's Failed 1820 Gubernatorial
Campaign," Gateway Heritage 24 (Fall 2003-Winter 2004): 104-11; Jerome O.
Steffen, "William Clark: A New Perspective of Missouri Territorial Politics,
1813-1820," Missouri Historical Review 47 (January 1973): 171-97.
20. William Clark to J. c. Calhoun, April 29, 1824, U.S. Superintendency of Indian
Affairs, St. Louis, Records, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka (quotation).
21. Fausz, "Becoming 'a Nation of Quakers,''' 38; Walter A. Schroeder, Opening the
Ozarks: A Historical Geography of Missouri's Ste. Genevieve District,
1760-1830 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 194, 381-82;
Buckley, "William Clark," 114; John L. Loos, "William Clark: Indian Agent,"
Kansas Quarterly 3 (Fall 1971): 33-37. For the argument that removal amounted
to state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, see Faragher, "'More Motley Than
Mackinaw,' " 304-26.
22. William Clark (St. Louis) to the Secretary of War, December 8, 1823, McCarter &
English Indian Claim Cases, Box 18, Folder 2, Exhibit 91 (quotation); William Clark
to Secretary of War, June 1, 1829, ibid., Box 24, Folder 2, Exhibit 205 (quotation).
23. Clark quoted in Jerome O. Steffen, William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 150.
24. William Clark to Secretary of War, March 1, 1826, in Walter Lowrie and Walter
Franklin, eds., American State Papers, Class 11, Indian Affairs, 2 vols. (Washington,
DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), quotations on 2: 653; John Dougherty to William
Clark, September 10, 1828, in John A. Dougherty, Letterbook, 1826-1829, Western
Historical Manuscripts Collection, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia,
C2292, Letter 65 (quotation).
25. Landon Y. Jones, Jr., William Clark and the Shaping of the American West (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2004), 296-334.
26. Buckley, "William Clark," quotation on 268.
27. On the waning and waxing of popular interest in Lewis and Clark, see Winfield,
"Public Perception of the Expedition," 178-99; John Spencer, " 'We are not dealing
entirely with the past': Americans Remember Lewis & Clark," in Kris Fresonke and
Mark Spence, eds., Lewis and Clark: Legacies, Memories, and New Perspectives
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004),159-83.
28. Virginia Scharff, Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 11-33; Thomas P. Slaughter,
Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness (New York: Knopf,
2003), 86-113; Laura McCall, "Sacagawea: A Historical Enigma," in Kriste
Lindenmeyer, ed., Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Liues: Women in American
History (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000), 39-54; Angela Cavender Wilson,
"A New Encounter: The Native Oral Tradition of Lewis and Clark," in Taylor, ed.,
Lewis and Clark, 196-97,208-10.
29. Robert B. Betts, In Search of York: The Slave Who Went to the Pacific with Lewis
and Clark (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2000, rev. ed.), 135-43;
Slaughter, Exploring Lewis and Clark, 114-33; Winfield, "Public Perception of the
Expedition," 194-95.
88 Stephen Aron

30. William Clark to Jonathan Clark, May 28, 1809, in Holmberg, ed., Dear Brother,
quotations on 201; William Clark to Jonathan Clark, December 10, 1808, in ibid.,
quotation on 184; William Clark to Jonathan Clark, November 9, 1808, in
ibid., quotations on 160; James J. Holmberg, " 'A Notion about Freedom': The
Relationship of William Clark and York," Gateway Heritage 24 (Fa1l2003-Winter
2004): 80-87.
 Chapter 4

Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and

Frances Wright in America, 1818-1826

Gail Bederman

From American Literary History

In 1825, Frances Wright, British author and protegee of the aging Marquis
de Lafayette, proposed an antislavery experiment that became known as
Nashoba. Although Nashoba soon failed, it has made its way into the broad
narrative of u.s. history (and many u.s. history textbooks) as an inspiring
interracial utopia-a noble, if transient, step on the road to abolitionism
and racial equality. As one recent textbook puts it, "Influenced by Robert
Owen and New Harmony, Frances Wright established an interracial
utopian community, Nashoba, near Memphis, Tennessee" (Clark et al.
459). Another characterizes Nashoba as "a bold plan to set up a utopian
community of whites and freed slaves who would live together in full equality"
(Henretta et al. 336).1
Although this optimistic description fits nicely into textbook depictions
of u.s. history moving inevitably toward ever-increasing freedom, it bears
little relationship to Nashoba's actual character, nor to Wright's true aims in
establishing her "utopia." Wright's original goal was never to form an inter-
racial community. Rather, she hoped to perfect American liberty by ridding
the United States of both slavery and former slaves, through a complex
financial scheme that would support universal colonization. An English rad-
ical, Wright chafed at the British political repression of the 1810s and
viewed the United States, in contradistinction, as a utopia of liberty; she
planned Nashoba accordingly. She wanted to get rid of the U.S.'s slaves, so
the world's only true bastion of liberty could flourish.
The history of Nashoba is thus a complex story of political misrecogni-
tion. Naively idealizing America as a bastion of late eighteenth-century
republican principles, Wright misrecognized the United States as the perfect
90 Gail Bederman

republic-the opposite of 1810s British political corruption. Following this

logic, she misrecognized slavery as a vestigial remnant of British colonial
tyranny rather than an intrinsic part of U.S. political culture. In turn,
subsequent U.S. historians and history textbooks-with little understanding
of the transatlantic complexity of Wright's racial and civic identifications-
have misrecognized "Nashoba" as an early example of the type of interra-
cial community we would wish to see (but almost never do) in the United
States' distant past. In reality, Nashoba was never an "interracial community."
Wright's relationship with her slaves was no different from that of any other
benevolent slave mistress, and her slaves bore the brunt of her visionary
schemes. In founding Nashoba, Wright was motivated not by interracial
sympathy, but by a profound political, racial, and civic identification with
the patriots of 1776, especially republican slaveholders such as Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison. Nashoba's inevitable failure was caused by
this ironic misrecognition.

Late Enlightenment Middle-Class British

Radicalism and Wright's Youth
In 1825, when Wright began to plan Nashoba, her political philosophy was
radical in Britain but absolutely mainstream in the United States. In Britain,
her politics fit into the current known today as philosophic radicalism, a
type of middle-class radicalism espoused by thinkers such as Jeremy
Bentham, William Godwin, Joseph Priestley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In
Britain, philosophic radicalism had been firmly suppressed since the outbreak
of war with revolutionary France in 1793. Yet in the United States, Wright's
early political enthusiasms were quite ordinary-even old-fashioned-and
echoed Revolutionary era republicanism. 2
Wright was drawn to republican ideals partly in reaction to the Tory
relatives who raised her. Born in 1795 to a Scottish merchant with radical
sympathies, Wright was orphaned at the age of two and raised by her
mother's Tory father and sister, whom she grew to detest. Growing up
during the Napoleonic wars when political radicalism of all sorts was asso-
ciated with the French enemy-hearing, no doubt, political aspersions cast
on her dead, liberty-loving father-the young girl intuitively identified with
the radicalism of the 1790s (figure 4.1).3
Then, around 1812, Wright discovered America-or more accurately, she
read Carlo Botta's epic history of the birth of North American liberty,
History of the War of Independence of the United States of America (1809),
which had just been translated from Italian into French. Written to reaffirm
erstwhile Girondists' faith in republicanism after the excesses of the French
Revolution, Botta's stirring history seemed to her like a dream come true:
"From that moment," Wright wrote years later "[I] awoke, as it were, to a
new existence .... There existed a country consecrated to freedom, and in
which man might awake to the full knowledge and extent of his power"
 Revisiting Nashoba 9I

Figure 4.1 Frances Wright.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC.

(D' Arusmont 11). Having satisfied herself that the United States of America
really existed despite the fact that none of her grandfather's friends ever
spoke of it, Wright quietly vowed to visit it. 4 Because she and her sister had
inherited small fortunes from their uncle, an officer with the East India
Company, she would have extraordinary opportunities to pursue her
utopian vision of distant American liberty (Morris 7).
Although Wright had been relatively well educated at her grandfather's
house, her paternal relations finished her education in Enlightenment
principles and opposition politics. As soon as she was eighteen, she fled
from her maternal relations and, with her devoted sister Camilla in tow,
joined the household of her uncle James Mylne, who held the chair of
moral philosophy at Glasgow University. Although Wright herself always
depicted her radical politics as entirely self-generated, she was certainly
deeply influenced by the "aspiring women and Scottish Whigs" of the
Mylne family and its network of friends and relations (Rendall). In Wright's
own telling, however, she spent her three years in Glasgow deepening her
92 Gail Bederman

knowledge of the United States. Her uncle helped Wright gain access to the
university library, where she spent the next three winters poring over "all
that had yet appeared in print respecting the American colonies"
(D'Arusmont 13).5 During these months, Wright also imbibed an anachro-
nistic, 1790s version of Anglo-American republicanism from a woman she
soon began to call "Mother," Robina Craig Millar. In 1795, Millar, related
by marriage to Wright's uncle Mylne, had settled in Philadelphia as part of
the great emigration of radicals who, like Joseph Priestley, fled to the United
States to escape anti-Jacobin repression. Millar and her husband had been
part of Benjamin Rush's Pennsylvania circle of British expatriates, until
John Millar's unexpected death eighteen months later had forced Robina to
return to Scotland, where she continued to see herself as a patriot and to
correspond with Rush until he died in 1813. 6
Millar's Revolutionary-era republicanism reinforced the idealistic literary
depictions of the United States that Wright devoured in the Glasgow
University Library. Together, they confirmed Wright's belief that the United
States was a progressive republican utopia. At the same time, they left her
singularly unprepared to understand the less egalitarian aspects of nineteenth-
century U.S. society. Steeped in late-Enlightenment radicalism, including a
belief that talented women should ignore their sex and take up important
work, Wright reached the age of twenty-three imbued with ideas that were
radical in Britain but absolutely mainstream in the United States.

"A country where the dreams of sages, smiled

at as utopian, seem distinctly realized": Views
of Society and Manners in America (1821)
In 1818, Wright announced to her startled friends and relations that she and
Camilla were about to embark on a trip to America. Her uncle Mylne tried
to convince his nieces that a grand tour of Italy and Greece would be more
suitable. His arguments fell on deaf ears. Wright, objecting that her heart
would break to see the Italians-the heirs of Roman republicanism-under
the Austrian yoke, asked rhetorically whether "a young country inhabited
by freemen, was not more worthy to attract curiosity than countries in ruin,
inhabited by slaves?" (D'Arusmont 14).7 She seems to have been relatively
unconcerned that her beloved America, too, was "inhabited by slaves."
The United States did not disappoint its young enthusiast. From the
moment she first glimpsed the New York coastline, Wright contrasted
American liberty and prosperity to British despotism and inequality. She
described this sight to Millar in her first letter, "Here was seen no great
proprietor, his mighty domains stretching in silent and solitary grandeur for
uninterrupted miles, but thousands of little villas or thriving farms, bespeaking
the residence of the easy citizen or tiller of the soil" (Wright, Views 8-9).
Wright spent most of the next twenty-one months in the United States,
which seemed to her a veritable utopia of democracy. 8
 Revisiting Nashoba 93

Wright postponed entering slave territory until a month before her depar-
ture, when she finally visited Washington, DC. Slavery's reality was more
shocking than she had expected. As she wrote in her final letter, "The sight
of slavery is revolting everywhere, but to inhale the impure breath of its
pestilence in the free winds of America is odious beyond all that the imagi-
nation can conceive" (Wright, Views 167). Slavery, encountered late and
incompletely on her travels, marred America's near-perfection. 9
Wright returned to England ambitious to advance the linked causes of
America and liberty and ready to step upon the public stage. British radical-
ism had slowly begun to revive after the close of the Napoleonic wars, and
Wright was eager to help it along. Encouraged by her relations, she decided
to revise and publish her letters home to counter Tory travel literature about
American social and political backwardness. In six months, Views of
Society and Manners in America (1821) was ready for publication. 1o
Views of Society depicts the United States of America as a republican
utopia: "It is singular to look round upon a country where the dreams of
sages, smiled at as utopian, seem distinctly realized, a people voluntarily
submitting to laws of their own imposing ... respecting the voice of a
government which their breath created and which their breath could in
a moment destroy" (Wright, Views 188). Political liberty had allowed
Americans, masters of their own political fate, to banish poverty, misery,
and ignorance.
All Britain's problems had been solved in America. Every dwelling in
New York City was comfortable. There were no dark alleys, "no hovels,
in whose ruined garrets or dank and gloomy cellars crowd the wretched
victims of vice and disease" (Wright, Views 13). In America "there seem
to be neither poor nor uneducated" (16). Women could leave their shop-
ping on the pavement and return later, for nobody would steal anything
(17). Love of liberty had even led to the proscription of all corporal
punishment: "in the schools, in the prisons, on shipboard, in the army-
everywhere, in short, where authority is exercised it must be exercised
without appeal to the argument of a blow" (217). Most strikingly
utopian was Wright's assertion that universal manhood suffrage had
transformed American men into liberal philosophers. Americans were
"well-informed and liberal philosophers, who can give you, in half an
hour, more solid instruction and enlightened views than you could receive
from the first corps litteraire or diplomatique of Europe by listening to
them for a whole evening" (65). Democratic participation combined with
universal education had made American citizens into embodiments of
enlightenment (98-99).11
Wright contrasted the fruits of American liberty with British want and
corruption. English farmers suffered from high tithes and taxes, official cor-
ruption, and "anxious fears" about their children's futures. In contrast,
American farmers enjoyed "plenty at the board, good horses in the stable,
an open door, a friendly welcome, light spirits and easy toil-such is what
you find with the American farmer. In England. . .. " Wright finished by
94 Gail Bederman

quoting a poem about the fall of Rome, adding darkly that she hoped that
Britain still retained enough vigor to "work her own regeneration" (Wright,
Views 98-99).
Britain had caused the one odious imperfection in America's utopia-
slavery, "the blot which defaces a portion of the Union" (Wright, Views 41).
Yet like an inkblot on an immaculate linen cloth, slavery had been imposed
from outside upon America's otherwise perfect liberty. British colonialism
had saddled the United States with slavery. Perhaps Wright learned this
argument from Millar, for it was as old as the nation itself. In an early draft
of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had listed the institution of
slavery as one item on a long list of intolerable royal offences, although
slaveholding interests made him strike the phrase. Now Wright updated this
old argument by insisting that, since 1776, U.S. legislators had invariably
tried to get rid of slavery, first by abolishing the slave trade under the
Constitution and later by gradually abolishing slavery in the Northern states
(37-39). Wright even managed to explain the five new slave states admitted
to the union since 1776 as residual effects of French and British colonial
slavery (202-05).
Race prejudice, too, was a British import, Wright insisted. Perhaps she
spoke from experience: her description of a European's disgusted reaction to
a group of free blacks in Philadelphia suggests her own visceral racism and,
perhaps, her shame at that response:

When [a European] sees a crowd of black faces assembled at the corner of a

street, or descries the sable cheeks and clumsy features of a negro girl under a
pink silk bonnet, the sight offends him from its ugliness, and an immediate
distaste at the country, defaced by a mixture of so novel and unseemly a
population, takes possession of his mind. (Wright, Views 41)

Wright insisted however, that Americans, unlike Europeans, felt sorry for
free Negroes and treated them with gentleness and benevolence (41).
Although Wright condemned racial prejudice, she did not believe that
recently freed "Negroes" or their immediate descendants were capable of
being good republican citizens-an opinion she would retain when she
planned Nashoba. Generations of enforced slavery, she explained, had
rendered American Negroes inferior to whites in both character and appear-
ance. Despite a few laudable exceptions in New England, most of America's
freed Negroes remained morally lax, lazy, frivolous, and unable to plan for
the future (Wright, Views 41-44). Slavery's abjection had raised a "barrier
between the American and the negro, similar to that which separates the
higher from the poorer and less polished classes of society in Europe. The
black and the white man are a distinct race, and the distinction is, as yet, no
less marked in the internal than the external man" (43). Perhaps generations
of benevolent education could uplift the Negroes of the United States.
Perhaps not. She could not predict, although she hoped the experiment
would be tried (43, 44, 267-70).
 Revisiting Nashoba 95

These ambiguous views on race and slavery, basically unchanged, would

underlie Wright's own antislavery experiment five years later. She believed
that American Negroes as a class, like ignorant European peasants, were
intrinsically inferior to America's white "citizen philosophers." Yet, as with
European peasants, their inferiority-however difficult to stamp out-
stemmed not from intrinsic racial character but from the lasting degradation
caused by slavery. She admired Haiti, particularly its educated mulatto lead-
ership, who, generations away from slavery, had achieved great things. For
example, three years later she admiringly described the Haitian emissary
Jonathas Granville. Granville, she explained, like many educated Haitians,
had served in Europe in the French army and possessed all the attributes of
an enlightened European himself: He "has the air & manners, information &
conversation of a polite European-his color very dark mulatto features
good & countenance pleasing" (Wright to Julia Garnett, November 12,
1824, quoted in Payne-Gaposchkin 230). She particularly admired
Granville's modest demeanor in the United States and his patience with
ignorant whites, who, unaware of his education, background, and
character, treated him disrespectfully. In short, although Wright had little
faith in the capacity of people who had lived as slaves themselves, she never
believed that racial character was immutable-that is, for future generations
untainted by slavery.12
Race plays a relatively small role in Views of Society and Manners in
America, but one that would set the stage for Wright's abolitionist experi-
ment at Nashoba. The book's final paragraph reconciles the incongruity of
a slaveholding republic rhetorically, linking the republican past with the
utopian future-the heroic revolution of 1776 with the ultimate abolition of
slavery. Wright wrote that she had seen in America "so bright a dawning of
national glory, so fair a promise of a brilliant meridian day" that she
regarded with "regret, impatience and anxiety ... every stain that rests
upon [America's] morals" (Wright, Views 270). Slavery stained America's
past and present-but must it stain her future? Americans single-handedly
bore the "awful responsibility" of safeguarding "the liberties of mankind"
and "the honor of freedom" (270):

[T]he agents of tyranny are active in one hemisphere; may the children of lib-
erty be equally active in the other hemisphere! May they return with fresh
ardor to the glorious work which they formerly encountered with so much
success-in one word, may they realize the conviction lately expressed to me
by their venerable President that "the day is not very far distant when a slave
will not be found in America!" (270)

Little did she imagine when she concluded her book that within five years,
she herself would undertake precisely that task.
Published in Britain in May 1821, Wright's ostensibly apolitical
travelogue launched her political career. Tories were outraged at her utopian
portrait of the United States. The London Literary Gazette called Views
96 Gail Bederman

"a tissue of impertinence, injustice, and falsehood" (quoted in Morris 47).

The Quarterly Review-nasty, but not inaccurate---called it "a most ridiculous
and extravagant panegyric" (quoted in Morris 47).
Yet British readers who longed for a rebirth of radical principles
delighted in Wright's portrait of American liberty. Charles Maclaran, Whig
editor of The Scotsman, rejoiced to discover in Wright's pages "what I
wished to be true, yet was afraid to rely on, so amply confirmed by the result
of your experience and observation" (quoted in Perkins and Wolfson 58).
Jeremy Bentham, probably delighted with Wright's assertion that universal
manhood suffrage had made Americans into citizen-philosophers, immedi-
ately invited her to visit, and soon became one of her mentors. In at least one
letter to Bentham, Wright-underlining for emphasis-refers to the United
States as "our Utopia" (Wright to Bentham, September 12-15, 1821,
quoted in Conway 10:392).

Preserving the American Utopia by Abolishing

Slavery: Planning Nashoba as Model Farm,
February-December 1825
The story of Nashoba begins in late 1824, when the Wright sisters returned
to the United States. Frances had spent the previous three years enmeshed in
radical French politics as the self-styled "adopted daughter" of the Marquis
de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution, who admired her book and
who materially reinforced her identification with the generation of 1776.13
Yet as Celia Morris has shown, soon after Frances arrived in New York with
Camilla on September 11, 1824, ready to accompany Lafayette on his
triumphal farewell U.S. tour, she realized that she could no longer serve as
Lafayette's assistant-she would need to find a different avenue for her
political energies (Morris 79-83).
As Lafayette toured during the winter of 1824-1825, Wright began to
ponder how to rid America of its one great flaw-slavery. On this trip,
unlike their first, the Wright sisters spent most of their time in the South,
where Frances had the opportunity to observe slavery in detail. The experi-
ence both sickened and obsessed her. A month after her arrival, she was
traumatized by the sight of a boatload of manacled slaves, destined for the
Southern slave markets. She frequently repeated the story in her letters: "My
heart is sick.... I have seen [my fellow creatures] manacled when sold on
board a vessel bound for New Orleans .... I cannot write on this subject
and yet it preys so continually on my mind that I find it difficult to
write on any other" (Wright to Garnett, October 30, 1824, quoted in
Payne-Gaposchkin 228).14
In 1825, slavery was not yet a white woman's issue in the United States.
A number of women had been active in the successful British campaign
against the slave trade between 1808 and 1815, and by 1826, British
women would begin to form the ladies' antislavery societies that would have
 Revisiting Nashoba 97

so much impact on abolitionism in Britain and, after 1830, the United

States. Yet there is no evidence that Wright knew or cared about any of these
British female forerunners. She eschewed typical feminine antislavery
tactics. She conducted no petition drives, spent no time fundraising for other
activists, and wrote no antislavery literatureY Moreover, unlike most other
female abolitionists, Wright scorned religion as irrational and unnatural.
Her antislavery motivations were secular and pragmatic. America could not
achieve its true republican greatness-could not be the perfect utopia of
liberty depicted in Views of Society-while slaves resided within her
borders.
In short, Wright's strategies made her a most atypical female antislavery
activist. Independently wealthy, and used to acting as Lafayette's assistant in
France, she tried to manipulate the levers of power by lobbying powerful
male politicians to support her project, as she had previously done in
Europe on Lafayette's behalf and in his name. She spent the winter of
1824-1825 in Washington, DC, hobnobbing with congressmen and taking
every opportunity to study slavery's laws, observe its practice, and discuss it
with the wealthy planters who, she believed, best understood it. Particularly
influential was a week she spent with Lafayette at Monticello, where she
discussed slavery with Jefferson, whose support of state-sponsored
colonization she admired (Wright to Garnett, November 12, 1824, quoted
in Payne-Gaposchkin 229-30).16 Still assuming, as she had in her book, that
Americans sincerely wanted to rid their country of slavery but lacked the
means to do so, she took upon herself the task of developing and
implementing an effective plan of abolition.
By summer 1825, Wright had developed her plan, which was based on,
first, the principles of cooperative labor used by George Rapp's religious
community in Indiana and, second, her profound misunderstanding of
planters' complaints about slavery. Wright had gleaned both while traveling
through the United States. To gather more information on slavery, Wright
took Camilla on a two-month spring tour through the interior and down the
Mississippi to New Orleans, where they planned to meet Lafayette. On the
way, they spent several days with James and Dolley Madison at their
plantation-Wright enjoyed spending time with powerful U.S. politicians-
then traveled inland to southern Indiana, where they stopped to visit
Harmonie, the large, prosperous religious community led by German pietist
Rapp. Harmonie's comfort and prosperity, which the Rappites themselves
ascribed to their unique way of organizing work, contrasted so markedly
with the surrounding countryside that no doubt seemed possible--cooperative
labor's productivity was as superior to that of individual labor as the
productivity of ordinary free labor was to slave labor. A seed was planted:
might "united labor," as practiced by the Rappites, contribute to slavery's
abolition?l? By the time Wright reached New Orleans, she had begun to
imagine a large model farm, organized on the Rappite system, on which
slaves could earn the price of their purchase through their labor. She began
to drop hints to Louisiana slaveholders about her emancipation plan. 18
98 Gail Bederman

Wright profoundly misunderstood New Orleans's slaveholders' responses

to her hints about the dangers of slavery and the desirability of abolition.
Yet her confusion is understandable, if unfortunate. Southerners were still
panicked about Denmark Vesey's alleged rebellion three years earlier. Still
terrified of being murdered in their beds by mutinous slaves, they were only
too happy to agree that slavery was a frightening and dangerous institution,
albeit one they were stuck with. Moreover, given the date, it is unlikely that
any educated slaveholder gave Wright any reasoned defense of slavery. In
1825, arguments that slavery was "a positive good" had not yet made their
way into general circulation. Hearing slaveholders speak passionately about
slavery's dangers rather than its benefits, Wright seems to have taken
literally planters' hyperbolic protestations that they wished slavery would
disappearY Understandably misreading slave owners' ubiquitous com-
plaints as a widespread appetite for abolition, Wright convinced herself that
Southerners longed desperately for a plan to abolish slavery before race war
broke out and their slave property became worthless. 20
Wright returned from New Orleans confident that the most influential
Southerners would support abolition, if it could be accomplished safely and
with no financial loss. By June 8, she had finished her plan and received
Lafayette's blessing. 21 By the end of July, she had printed up copies of her
prospectus and, with Lafayette's help, was soliciting subscriptions and sup-
port from leading U.S. politicians for this project, which eventually became
Nashoba.
Although Nashoba, as Wright originally planned it, was grandiose in
scope, it was not itself a utopia. Rather, Nashoba was a scheme to abolish
all U.S. slavery in order to save Wright's true utopia, the United States.
Wright explained her scheme in her prospectus, entitled "A Plan-for the
gradual abolition of slavery in the United States, without danger or loss to
the citizens of the south." Slavery, she began, presented self-evident dangers
to the U.S.'s future-disunion, bloodshed, "servile wars of extermination"
(Wright, "Plan" 58).22
Yet two conditions must be met in any practical emancipation scheme.
First, planters must be convinced that emancipation would not cause them
any pecuniary sacrifice. Second, all emancipated slaves must be settled out-
side the borders of the United States. The latter was not an unusual demand:
in the 1820s, colonization remained the main focus of most white aboli-
tionists, and although Wright privately ridiculed Americans' color prejudice
as irrational, she was perfectly happy to humor it to abolish slavery and
perfect American liberty. Satisfying these conditions, Wright believed,
would gain planters' support and assuage their terror of race war (Wright to
Garnett, June 8, 1825, quoted in Payne-Gaposchkin 240-41). Above all,
Wright promised that if put into practice, her plan would abolish slavery
and remove all former slaves from the United States in about eighty-five
years ("Plan" 58-59).
To demonstrate the feasibility of her scheme, Wright proposed to open a
pilot project-a large model farm populated by at least one hundred slaves
 Revisiting Nashoba 99

who would work the fields according to George Rapp's superproductive

"united labor" system. Within five years, Wright calculated, the average
slave working under this system would produce enough to cover the entire
costs of the enterprise. The efficiencies of united labor would allow him to
produce enough to pay his owner a fair price for his purchase, to cover the
project's overhead, and to transport him and his family, with all necessary
farming implements, to a foreign colony such as Liberia or Haiti. In addition,
this superproductive labor system would allow each slave to earn enough
to pay for the purchase of an additional slave to replace him (Wright,
"Plan" 58).
In other words, Wright's plan was a pyramid scheme that depended upon
highly inflated expectations of "united labor." Under this plan, each slave
would raise the money to purchase himself and another, and so double the
number of slaves in the emancipation pipeline every five years. As the great
productivity of this united labor rendered traditional slave labor unprof-
itable, others would open similar Rappite farms. Unable to sell their produce
as cheaply as that produced by free or united slave labor, slaveholders would
eagerly send their slaves to these farms to recoup their investment before the
bottom fell out of slavery. Gradually, as hundreds of thousands of slaves
were resettled abroad, not only slavery but also the former slaves themselves
would disappear from the United States, leaving it a land of perfect liberty
("Plan" 58).
Wright's scheme would thus reimburse the slaveholder, educate the slave
for freedom, open the South for free white labor, and banish both Negroes
and slavery from America forever. Wright even included a table demon-
strating how long it would take to "redeem the whole slave population of
the United States" beginning with 100 slaves (eighty-five years), or with
800 slaves (sixty years) ("Plan" 59). She included, in addition, a detailed
budget estimating how much it would cost to open, equip, populate, and
run such an establishment for the first year: $42,168 ("Plan" 59).
In short, when Wright planned Nashoba, she had no intention of estab-
lishing a community of any sort, utopian or otherwise. Nashoba would be
successful only if its residents departed from the premises as expeditiously
as possible. The whole purpose of her plan was to facilitate slaves'
permanent removal from both Nashoba and the United States, while safe-
guarding slave owners' pecuniary interests (Wright, "Plan" 58-59).23 In
this original Plan, Nashoba was simply a means to perfect Wright's true
utopia-the United States, which she still saw as the antithesis of British
corruption.
Wright had every faith that her plan would succeed because she believed
that white politicians such as Jefferson, Henry Clay, and Madison would
support it. Together, she and Lafayette tried to put her plan into effect using
traditional male political methods-that is, by working his network of influ-
ential and powerful friends. By the end of August, Lafayette had asked four
past or future Presidents-Jefferson, Madison, James Monroe, Andrew
Jackson-as well as Chief Justice John Marshall to support Wright's plan. 24
100 Gail Bederman

Wright herself, who had learned political organizing from Lafayette, likewise
contacted prominent U.S. politicians, sending her prospectus and requesting
advice, sponsorship, and financial contributions. 25 Wright's surviving letter
to Clay, for example, politely requests his advice and sponsorship while
assuring him of the great support her plan had already received from "many
distinguished citizens in the South and North" (Wright to Clay, July 28,
1825, in Hopkins 557).
Now, for the first time, Wright's American utopia began to disappoint.
By December, no one had offered to finance her plan except Lafayette,
whose proffered $8,000 she lovingly refused. 26 Throughout these months,
Wright seems to have misinterpreted good wishes and vague promises as
serious support. Used to acting as a sort of honorary man when aiding
Lafayette, she did not understand how differently men responded when she
attempted to achieve her own political aims.27
Madison's response, however, ought to have given Wright pause, for the
experienced planter wrote forthrightly that her plan was financially
unworkable. He rightly predicted that Wright would be hard pressed merely
to produce a surplus over what was necessary to keep her farm afloat, let
alone repay the purchase price of her slaves. He doubted "that there is such
an advantage of united over individual labor as is taken for granted" in her
plan (Madison 497). Madison surely feared but did not say that Wright,
who knew nothing about farming, would be lucky to avoid bankruptcy, let
alone make staggering profits from an untried system of labor. He urged her
to commence her project "on a scale smaller than that assumed in the
prospectus" (498).
Lacking any investors, Wright adopted this advice perforce. Nashoba
began on a much smaller scale than she had envisioned. Wright used her
own money to purchase about 1,240 acres of unimproved "second rate"
land in western Tennessee. Significantly, she located the land with the aid
of Jackson-the only instance in which Lafayette's political network came
through for her (Morris 109). Here, the colonialist nature of Wright's
project becomes most visible. The land she purchased from the United
States' most famous Indian fighter had belonged to Chickasaw Indians
until 1818, when Jackson himself maneuvered Congress into giving him
the ability to force the Indians to cede it. There is no evidence Wright
herself thought much about its previous owners, however.28 Purchasing
recently confiscated Native American land with profits her uncle had
amassed in British India, Wright prepared to put her abolitionist plan into
effect.
Bitterest of all, without donations of money and slaves, Wright could
not afford the hundred slaves needed to reap the financial rewards of
"united labor." Instead, Wright purchased eight people of her own with
whom to begin her "experiment": Willis, Jacob, Grandison, Redick,
Henry, Nelly, Peggy, and Kitty. Still hoping that early success would
convince planters to send dozens of slaves later, she named her new farm,
"Nashoba."29
 Revisiting Nashoba I0 I

Wright's Plan Fails; Nashoba Becomes a

Non-Interracial, Utopian Community of
Free White Trustees, December 1826
Only seven months after Nashoba's official opening, it had become clear
that Wright's highly publicized experiment in abolishing slavery through
"united labor" had failed utterly. The necessary funding to make the
attempt never arrived. As late as July 15, 1826, Wright was still trying to
obtain 200 additional slaves for the "cheap rate" of $50 each to try the
united labor plan (Marie D. Fretageot to William Maclure, August 11,
1826, quoted in Mirabella 405).30 Yet she herself could afford no more
slaves, and it soon became clear that no donations of slaves were forthcoming.
Worse, rumors began to swirl, especially among opponents of slavery, that
Wright's plan was merely a confidence trick to obtain free labor for her
plantation, under the pretense of philanthropic emancipation. 31 Wright,
thus, had no constituency for her pilot project. The plan could not succeed.
Yet despite its evident failure as an emancipation scheme, Wright could
not simply walk away from Nashoba. She had spent about $10,000-over
a quarter of her fortune-on its land and slaves. 32 Moreover, she was
publicly and morally committed to both emancipating and colonizing her
slaves; thus, she could not simply sell her slaves to recoup her investment,
even if she were willing to do so. On top of the potential loss of her slave
investments, colonization involved the substantial additional expense of
transporting the slaves abroad and equipping them for a lifetime of self-
sufficient agriculture. Wright had always insisted Nashoba would pay for
itself. She was not prepared to impoverish herself to make good on her
much-publicized commitment to the slaves' emancipation and colonization.
Above all, emancipating Nashoba's slaves at this juncture would be admit-
ting publicly that there was no way to abolish slavery with no expense to the
slaveholders-an admission of failure that she was not yet ready to make.
Instead, she turned on the nation she had misrecognized as a utopia of
liberty. Turning bitterly on the white American politicians, leaders, and
"citizen philosophers" that she had praised in her book, she now crafted a
new oppositional political identity. Race developed a new salience for
Wright now, as she began to sneer that despite republican pretensions, the
United States of America as a whole was profoundly and indelibly proslavery.
Now, for the first time, Wright became an American radical, rather than a
British one. Jettisoning her utopian idealization of the United States, she
remade Nashoba as a utopian community.
Yet even as a utopia, Nashoba was neither egalitarian nor interracial.
Rather, it retained the two conditions Wright had stressed in her plan. First,
there would be no financial loss to slaveholders (that is, to herself). Second,
the new utopia remained committed to colonization.
On December 17, 1826, Wright publicly abandoned both her plan and
her now shattered faith in the United States as utopia by signing three deeds
102 Gail Bederman

that transformed Nashoba from a privately owned model farm into a

utopian community and philanthropic trust. The three deeds reorganized
Nashoba as a trust, and-adopting some, but not all, of the principles of
Robert Owen's failing utopia New Harmony33-gave daily governing
power to "resident trustees." Now, for the first time, Nashoba became a
utopian community of free whites rather than a privately owned model
farm. The resident trustees were responsible for making all decisions and
administering the property for the "collective benefit of the Negro race" as
a whole (Wright, "Frances Wright's Establishment for the Abolition of
Slavery" 440).
Nashoba was not, however, an "interracial" utopia: its slaves could never
become trustees. They could at best become "coadjutors," residents who
could enjoy the community's "benefits" but make no decisions. In fact, the
slaves were simply part of Nashoba's movables. According to the trust,
slaves must remain enslaved until they had earned their purchase price,
when they must be "colonized out of the limits of the United States" and
then freed (Wright, "Frances Wright's Establishment for the Abolition of
Slavery" 440). Thus, under Nashoba's new guidelines, as under the old,
only in Liberia or Haiti could its slaves hope to achieve full social equality.
Moreover, Wright was as unwilling to lose her substantial monetary
investment as any other slaveholder. Under the new trust, before the slaves
could be freed they were required to purchase themselves, as a group, from
the trust for $6,000 plus 6 percent annual interest (Wright, "Frances
Wright's Establishment for the Abolition of Slavery" 440). Wright still
hoped to prove that slave labor could finance emancipation while providing
a good rate of return on slave owners' investments. In short, even in this
new "utopian" phase Nashoba was no "egalitarian interracial community."
In establishing this trust, Wright publicly abandoned her grand, failed
emancipation scheme. Wright, who always hated admitting mistakes, did
not do so now. Instead, she insisted this reorganization simply put Nashoba
under the protection of many trustees rather than one individual. Yet
despite her brave front, her plan's original rationale-abolishing all
American slavery-had disappeared. Only a promise to colonize Nashoba's
fifteen slaves and build a temporary school for their children remained.
Yet although Wright refused to admit that she had abandoned her previous
utopian goals, she used the occasion of publicizing Nashoba's new structure
to attack the nation she had once lauded as utopian. Who should manage
Nashoba, she asked? No U.S. governmental body could carry out its mission,
she claimed, for under the states' constitutions, political leaders must reflect
the "feelings of the majority of the nation" (Wright, "Frances Wright's
Establishment for the Abolition of Slavery" 440), and most Americans, she
now sneered, were incurably racist. One might imagine Nashoba could be
placed under the control of the colonization societies, she continued. Yet these
were the creations of wealthy slaveholders, who, Wright now jeered, wanted
not to abolish slavery but to remove any inconveniences (presumably trou-
blesome free blacks and slaves) that might force them to abolish slavery.
 Revisiting Nashoba 103

Wright next turned her sights on religion. Perhaps to insult the slaveholders she
had once courted, she conceded that emancipation societies (anathema in the
South) were "real friends of the liberty of man" (440). However, the avowed
freethinker continued, emancipationists' benevolence was connected with
"peculiar tenets of religion" (440). No longer did Wright see the American
populace as citizen-philosophers: they were ignorant and prejudiced,
hypocritical and self interested, or irritating religious fanatics (440-41).
In short, as Wright set up her own quasi-Owenite utopian community,
she publicly repudiated her previous belief in America as utopia. Yet as
utopian as her new plan was, it, too, was neither interracial nor egalitarian.
Nashoba's continued commitment to colonization and fully compensated
emancipation meant that its slaves remained both subordinates and, most
fundamentally, property.

Conclusion
Nashoba soon failed as a utopian community. During the summer of 1827,
Nashoba's free trustees dragged it through both a public sexual scandal and
many private draconian efforts to impose various visionary schemes on the
slaves. The most controversial of these schemes were efforts to impose a
quasi-Godwinian free love regime upon the colony as a whole-an important
aspect of Nashoba's utopian phase which I discuss elsewhere. 34 At the height
of this phase, Nashoba was, in fact, interracial although not egalitarian: its
trustees included two free mulatto women, who participated fully in these
utopian schemes which included forbidding slaves to eat outside the
presence of the trustees and removing enslaved children from the authority
of their uneducated slave parents.
Wright herself was absent during most of these shenanigans, visiting
Europe to regain her health and recruit new trustees. Although absent, she
approved the trustees' controversial actions, communicated with them by
letter, and enthusiastically defended their unconventional activities to her
startled European friends and relations. 35 In December of the same year, in
the hold of the ship Edward on her way back to the United States, she wrote
the famous-in some quarters, infamous-document that gave Nashoba its
reputation as an interracial egalitarian community, "Explanatory Notes
Respecting the Nature and Objects of the Institution of Nashoba, and of the
Principles on which it is Founded.... " Written as a public defense of the
principles underlying the trustees' scandalous defense of free love,
"Explanatory Notes" attacked the institution of marriage as inimical to
human happiness and proposed racial amalgamation-miscegenation-as
the solution to the United States' race problems. "Explanatory Notes" also,
finally, removed Nashoba from the emancipation business, announcing that
the community would accept no more donations of slaves unless they were
owned by a free trustee who was joining the egalitarian community. At long
last, in these "Explanatory Notes," Wright did propose turning Nashoba
into an interracial, egalitarian utopia. 36
104 Gail Bederman

Unfortunately, this final, egalitarian, and most famous "Nashoba Plan"

was never put into practice. Unbeknownst to Wright, Nashoba had
already collapsed and was defunct. Its white trustees had departed. Its
long-suffering, hardworking slaves awaited the next futile attempt to ren-
der their labor on Wright's "second rate land" profitable to their owner.
When Wright arrived home at Nashoba in January 1828, she found her
community nearly abandoned. For several months, she remained in
Tennessee mourning the utter demise of her plans. By June, she finally
concluded that no useful political work could be done in rural Tennessee,
delegated the care of Nashoba and its slaves to other hands, and moved on
to other types of radical projects. 37
For the next year or two, Nashoba's slaves remained in bondage,
laboring in Tennessee. Then, in January 1830, Wright chartered a ship
and-at great personal and financial cost-transported them to Haiti.
Once there, she emancipated them. President Jean Pierre Boyer promised
her that he would look after them personally (Morris 211-12).38 No
evidence remains to show whether they prospered in their new home,
nor whether Wright ever asked any of them whether they desired to
emigrate.
What can we learn from this sad story of misrecognition and failed
hopes? First, Nashoba makes sense only when situated in the context of
British political radicalism. From the moment Wright first glimpsed the
United States until her original plan for Nashoba failed, she viewed America
as the enlightened opposite of British corruption. She conceived Nashoba to
further the cause of the republican utopia she had described in Views of
Manners and Morals. Because slavery was a relic of British corruption,
Wright had faith that Americans would gladly cast it off, if they could afford
to do so. Because she saw the United States through the rosy lenses of British
radicalism, she truly believed liberty-loving Americans, North and South,
would recognize the efficacy of her plan, abolish slavery, and colonize all of
the United States' Negroes within eighty-five years, painlessly and with no
economic loss to the slaveholders.
Nashoba's collapse in 1826 turned Wright from a British to an American
radical. Aware now that the United States was no utopia, she turned on the
white Americans whom she had once viewed as allies, condemning them as
racist hypocrites. Yet she, too, like any other slaveholder, saw Nashoba's
enslaved residents as financial investments. Eventually, and inevitably,
Nashoba's second, utopian phase failed, too. Yet even today, we-Wright's
liberty-loving descendants--cherish utopian fantasies of Nashoba, at least
in our textbooks. Perhaps our desire to see heroism in Nashoba stems from
our own civic identification with the United States. Nostalgically, we long to
find some project-some insightful radical-that escaped the painful racial
realities that have always been interwoven with Americans' republican love
of liberty. Such antiracist radicals and histories may well have existed in the
1820s. Unfortunately, such a story cannot be found in the ironic history of
Nashoba.
 Revisiting Nashoba 105

Notes
Copyright © Gail Bederman 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights
reserved.
Gail Bederman, associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, is author
of Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880-1917. She is writing a prehistory of the American reproductive rights movement,
beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft and T. R. Malthus in England, and concluding with
Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, and Madame Restell (Ann Lohman) in the United
States.
Earlier, different versions of this paper were presented at the Women and
Enlightenment Conference at York University, the Stanford Humanities Center's Feminist
Theory Seminar, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota's Comparative Gender
History Seminar, and the University of Notre Dame's GenderlWomen's History Group.
I thank all the participants and other readers, particularly Jane Rendall, Estelle Freedman,
Karen Offen, Joanne Pope Melish, Annette Igra, Anna Clark, Lisa Norling, Elaine Tyler
May, Fay Yarbrough, Brandi Brimmer, and Heidi Ardizzone.
1. See also Winthrop D. Jordan and Leon Litwack, The United States: Conquering a
Continent, vol. 1 (2003), 230. The Encyclopedia Britannica entry for "Frances
Wright" at http://search.eb.comleb/article?eu=59241 (accessed March, 7,2004) like-
wise inaccurately reports that Wright freed her slaves before she settled them at
Nashoba. The three excellent biographies of Wright all provide accurate, detailed nar-
ratives of Nashoba's founding, fall, and place in Wright's life: Waterman 92-133;
Perkins and Wolfson 123-81; and Morris 87-167. Yet as biographies, all present
Nashoba as a story of Wright's personal-rather than political-failures. All overstate
Robert Owen's influence on Wright's original vision of Nashoba. All ignore or scant
Wright's intellectual debts to British philosophic radicalism. Consequently, all three
blur the profound political differences between Nashoba's initial stage as a noncom-
munitarian colonization scheme and its subsequent stage as utopian community. The
best short overview of Nashoba is in Nancy Woloch's textbook, Women and the
American Experience (1999), 159-205, which does an excellent job of tracing
Wright's goals, although, understandably, not her political context. Nonbiographical
scholarship also tends to depict Nashoba as an Owenite utopia from beginning to end.
See, for example, Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias (1970), 219-26 and Carol A.
Kolmerton, Women in Utopia (1998), 111-41. These scholarly tendencies have made
it possible for U.S. historians to misrecognize Nashoba as an "interracial anti-slavery
utopia." Note that the current essay concentrates on issues of race, slavery, and civic
identity, and as such does not consider Nashoba's well-known free love scandal. As
I argue elsewhere, Wright's letters began to hint about her new interest in free love in
November or December 1826, after it had become clear that her abolition scheme had
failed and shortly before she transformed Nashoba into a quasi-Owenite community
run by its trustees. See Gail Bederman, Sex, Politics, and Contraception in
England and the United States: A Pre-History of Reproductive Rights, 1793-1831
(forthcoming).
2. See Elie Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1955).
3. See D'Arusmont 9-11; Perkins and Wolfson 8-9, Waterman 16-18, Morris 6-7,11.
4. See D'Arusmont 11-12; Waterman 26-27; Perkins and Wolfson 8, 12-13; Morris 11.
5. See Waterman 26-28; Perkins and Wolfson 16-18; Morris 12-13.
6. See Rendall, to whom I am indebted for sharing her important articles on women in
the Scottish Enlightenment and on Millar and Wright prior to publication.
7. When she wrote these words in her autobiography more than twenty years later,
Wright still saw no irony in this question (Waterman 28-29; Morris 23-24).
106 Gail Bederman

8. See Waterman 30-55; Perkins and Wolfson 26-33.

9. See Wright's letter on slavery written to the Garnett sisters, probably in October
1820, reprinted in Payne-Gaposchkin 224-25. See also Morris 40.
10. See Perkins and Wolfson 55-56; Morris 42-44; Wright to Julia Garnett, November 22,
1820, in Payne-Gaposchkin 226.
11. Upper and Lower Canada were the only places Wright visited in America where she
claimed to find poverty or ignorance.
12. Wright discusses these distinctions most explicitly in her autobiography, written in
1844. From the section explaining Nashoba: "Neither the red savage nor the negro
slave can be converted into American citizens, by acts of legislation; and this not
because the one is black, nor the other red, but because the one is a savage, and the
other a slave . ... In both cases, the circumstances of color and feature increase,
though they do not constitute, the difficulty which has until now barred the progress
of either race, while placed in juxta-position with one, their superior in knowledge,
and therefore necessarily the sovereign disposer of their difficulties .... [T]o effect
the emancipation of the negro ... he must be made to go through a real moral,
intellectual, and industrial apprenticeship .... [F]rom the first generation little com-
paratively could be expected .... The children, brought up distant from their parents
in schools of agriculture and industry, might evidently be expected to effect
more .... In the rising, and, better, in all successive generations, the advancement of
the negro race itself in the scale of being might be presented, and its preparation for
independence and civilization secured by its acquisition of all the useful arts, and of
a familiarity with mechanical power" (D' Arusmont 28-30). The autobiography then
immediately turns to explaining Nashoba.
13. See Waterman 62-82; Perkins and Wolfson 60-79; Morris 54-62, 68-77.
14. See also Wright's letter of December 26,1825, printed in Le Globe (Tome IV: N.70)
January 23, 1827,370).
15. See Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870
(1995), 9-40, on these earliest women antislavery activists, and Bruce Dorsey,
"A Gendered History of African Colonization in the Antebellum United States,"
Journal of Social History 23 (2000): 77-103.
16. See also Morris 84-85.
17. Morris 86-94 best describes this journey and its effects on Wright's antislavery plan.
Wright herself reports on her thought processes in her letters of JanuaryIFebruary
1825, April 12, 1825, and June 8, 1825, reprinted in Payne-Gaposchkin 232-44,
and in her autobiography (D' Arusmont, 28).
18. Wright to Garnett, April 12, 1825, quoted in Payne-Gaposchkin 235, describes her
"hinting."
19. I am indebted to Joanne Melish, who suggested I consider the Vesey rebellion and
whose research pointed me to the undeveloped state of the "slavery as positive good"
argument in 1825. See Wright to Garnett, April 12, 1825, quoted in Payne-Gaposchkin
233,235.
20. For Wright's reports on her conversations with frightened slaveholders about incipient
slave rebellions in the Southern United States, see Wright to Garnett, April 12, 1825
and June 8, 1825, quoted in Payne-Gaposchkin 235-36 and 239-40, respectively.
21. An early, more or less complete version of the plan is detailed in Wright to Garnett,
June 8, 1825, quoted in Payne-Gaposchkin 240-44.
22. The following discussion is drawn from Wright, "A Plan," October 15, 1825,
58-59. Fay Yarbrough has quite rightly asked how Wright, who recognized the
existence of free blacks within the United States, envisioned her plan in relationship
to the Unites States' free blacks. The plan was intended to address neither white
Americans' color prejudices (which Wright saw as silly) nor the status of free people
 Revisiting Nashoba 107

of color (who did not concern her very much, either.) Rather, Wright wanted to root
out the institution of slavery which she saw as an evil and a corruption of u.s.
liberty. As a great admirer of the Haitian revolution, it never occurred to her that
racial characteristics would preclude free blacks, if suitably educated and some
generations removed from slavery, from behaving as republicans, particularly in
Haiti or Liberia. She was, however, willing to be pragmatic about white Americans'
ridiculous prejudices about skin color, and, for that reason, willing to accept colo-
nization as a practical necessity in U.S. emancipation. See Wright to Julia and Harriet
Garnett, November 12, 1824, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMSEng1304
(5), also reprinted in Payne-Gaposchkin 230-31. See also Wright to Julia Garnett,
June 8, 1825, quoted in Payne-Gaposchkin 240-41.
23. Wright elaborates upon her system and her belief that the superproductivity of
"united labor" would soon render traditional slavery completely profitless, in her
letter to Julia Garnett, June 8, 1825, quoted in Payne-Gaposchkin 241-42.
24. Lafayette to Wright, August 26, 1825, in Anna B. A. Brown, "A Dream of
Emancipation," New England Magazine June 30, 1904,495; Lafayette to Jackson,
August 21, 1825, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Spencer Bassett
(1928),290-91.
25. Remaining evidence of Wright's efforts can be found in Wright to Garnett, June 8,
1825, in Payne-Gaposchkin 244-45, in which she describes lobbying New York
Governor DeWitt Clinton; see also Jefferson to Wright, August 7, 1825, in The
Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (1904) 16: 119-21.
26. See Lafayette to Julia Garnett, March 16, 1825, in Garnett Papers, Houghton
Library, Harvard University, bMS 1304.1 (23); see also Morris 104.
27. On Wright's work in France as Lafayette's aide, see Waterman 69-78; Perkins and
Wolfson 71-84; Morris 70-71. During that time in France, Wright considered her-
self Lafayette's "adopted daughter"; as a daughter, she could further the political
goals of her "father." On female relations' ability to play important political roles,
see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics (2000). Once on her own, however, it was
harder for Wright to maneuver in that political world. For the most part, Wright
refused to adopt specifically "female" tactics. In this way, she was probably more
typical of British bluestocking than American female reform traditions. The litera-
ture on women reformers in antebellum United States is voluminous; see, esp. Lori
Ginzberg's Women and the Work of Benevolence (1990).
28. See John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition (2001),
245-49. My thanks to Fay Yarbrough for alerting me to this aspect of Nashoba's
history.
29. For the names of Nashoba's enslaved residents, see "Frances Wright's Establishment
for the Abolition of Slavery" in Genius of Universal Emancipation, February 24,
1827,440. Wright would eventually purchase Dilly, Willis's wife, and at least one of
their children as well.
30. See also Wright to Harriet and Julia Garnett, July 7, 1826, in Payne-Gaposchkin
437, for a similar plan.
31. See, for example, the letter dated "Chester District, S.c. April 6, 1826" in Genius of
Universal Emancipation, April 29, 1826: 275.
32. See Lafayette to Julia Garnet, June 19, 1826, in Garnett Papers, Houghton Library,
Harvard University, bMS 1304.1 (23).
33. Although these documents make it clear that the new Nashoba would be deeply
influenced by the utopian ideas of New Harmony, Wright knew from personal
experience that New Harmony was on the verge of collapse. On New Harmony's dis-
array during 1826, see Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias (1970), 184-94. Hoping to
profit from mistakes made at New Harmony, Wright adopted Owen's ideas
108 Gail Bederman

selectively. For example, she made it much harder to become a member through the
"trustee" system, and she deeded the property to the trust, rather than retaining pri-
vate ownership as Owen had. See Wright, "Frances Wright's Establishment for the
Abolition of Slavery," 440-41. Soon after Nashoba failed, however, the trustees
returned the property (including the slave property) to Wright's private ownership.
34. Waterman 112-20; Perkins and Wolfson 160-72; Morris 139-48. On the
Godwinian basis of Nashoba's free love practices, see Gail Bederman, Sex, Politics,
and Contraception in England and the United States: A Pre-History of Reproductive
Rights, 1793-1831 (forthcoming).
35. On Wright's support of Nashoba's doctrines, see, for example, James Mylne to Julia
Garnett, August 12, 1827, in Garnett Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard
University, bMSEng1304.1 (25); Wright to Mesdemoiselles Garnett, August 17,
1827, in Garnett Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMSEng1304 (22).
36. See Wright, "Nashoba: Explanatory Notes Respecting the Nature and Objects of the
Institution of Nashoba .... " Genius of Universal Emancipation, February 23,1828:
45-46; March 1, 1828: 52-53; March 8, 1828, 61-62.
37. See Waterman 129-31; Perkins and Wolfson 188-92, 200-07, 270-88; Morris
158-67,207-13. Wright's post-Nashoba political activities included the editorship
of the New Harmony Gazette, a series of lectures on infidelity and radical principles,
and eventually political activism in New York City. In addition to the biographies,
see especially Lori D. Ginzberg, " 'The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder': Fanny
Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought" American Quarterly 46 (1994):
195-226 and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic (1984), 176-83, 193-201,208-16.
38. The personal cost for Wright could not have been greater. As Morris shows, Wright
became pregnant on this journey, and this pregnancy stopped her political career.

Works Cited
Clark, Christopher, et al. Who Built America? Vol. 1. New York: Worth, 2000.
D'Arusmont, Frances Wright. "Biography and Notes." Life, Letters, and Lectures
1834-1844.1844. New York: Arno, 1972.
Fretageot, Marie Duclos. "To William Maclure." August 11, 1826. Partnership for
Posterity: The Correspondence of William Maclure and Marie Duclos Fretageot,
1820-1833. Ed. Joseph Mirabella. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Society,
1994.405.
Henretta, James A., et al. America's History. Vol 1. New York: Worth, 1993.
Madison, James. "To Miss Frances Wright." Letters and Other Writings of James
Madison. Philadelphia: Lippincott's, 1865. 495-98.
Morris, Celia. Fanny Wright: Rebel in America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 1984.
Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia Helena. "The Nashoba Plan for Removing the Evil of Slavery:
Letters of Frances and Camilla Wright, 1820-1829." Harvard Library Bulletin 23
(1975): 221-51; 429-61.
Perkins, A. J. G., and Theresa Wolfson. Frances Wright, Free Enquirer: The Study of a
Temperament. New York: Harper, 1939.
Rendall, Jane. " 'Women that would plague me with rational conversation': Aspiring
Women and Scottish Whigs, ca. 1790-1830." Feminism and the Enlightenment. Ed.
Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor. NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
- - - . "'Enlightened and utopian prospects: The journeys of Robina Millar
and Frances Wright 1795-1830." Enlightenment and Emancipation. Ed. Peter France
and Susan Manning. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, forthcoming.
 Revisiting Nashoba 109

Waterman, William Randall. Frances Wrightt. Studies in History, Economics and Public
Law 256. New York: Faculty of Columbia University, 1924.
Wright, Frances. "Frances Wright's Establishment for the Abolition of Slavery." Genius
of Universal Emancipation. February 24,1827: 440-41.
- - - . "A Plan." Genius of Universal Emancipation. October 15, 1825: 58-59.
- - . "From Frances Wright." July 28,1825. The Papers of Henry Clay. Vol. 4. Ed.
James F. Hopkins. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972. 557.
- - - . "From Frances Wright." September 12-15, 1821. The Correspondence ofJeremy
Bentham. Vol. 10. Ed. Stephen Conway. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. 392.
- - - . Views of Society and Manners in America. Ed. Paul R. Baker. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1963.
 Chapter 5

Outlawing "Coolies": Race, Nation, and

Empire in the Age of Emancipation

Moon-Ho Jung

From American Quarterly

A vote for Chinese exclusion would mean a vote against slavery, against
"cooly importation," a U.S. senator from California warned in 1882. "An
adverse vote now is to commission under the broad seal of the United States,
all the speculators in human labor, all the importers of human muscle, all
the traffickers in human flesh, to ply their infamous trade without impedi-
ment under the protection of the American flag, and empty the teeming,
seething slave pens of China upon the soil of California!" The other senator
from California added that those who had been "so clamorous against what
was known as African slavery" had a moral obligation to vote for Chinese
exclusion, "when we all know that they are used as slaves by those
who bring them to this country, that their labor is for the benefit of those
who practically own them." A "coolie," or "cooly," it seemed, was a slave,
pure and simple. Representative Horace F. Page (California) elaborated on
the same point in the other chamber, branding the "Chinese cooly contract
system" and polygamy the "twin relic[s] of the barbarism of slavery." The
United States was "the home of the down-trodden and the oppressed," he
declared, but "not the home for millions of cooly slaves and serfs who
come here under a contract for a term of years to labor, and who neither
enjoy nor practice any of our religious characteristics. ,,1
Some of their colleagues demanded clarification. If the bill aimed to
exclude "coolies," why did it target Chinese laborers wholesale? New
England Republicans, in particular, challenged the conflation of
"coolies" and "laborers." "All coolies are laborers, but are all Chinese
laborers coolies?" inquired a Massachusetts representative. Somewhat
flustered, Page claimed that they were synonymous in China and
California, where Chinatowns overflowed with "coolies and women of a
112 Moon-Ho Jung

class that I would not care to mention in this presence." His reply failed
to sway the bill's detractors, who assailed its indiscriminate prohibition
of Chinese immigration. With the Civil War and Reconstruction fresh in
everyone's memory, Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts vowed
never to "consent to a denial by the United States of the right of every
man who desires to improve his condition by honest labor-his labor
being no man's property but his own-to go anywhere on the face of the
earth that he pleases." There were limits to "honest labor" though.
Echoing a sentiment common among the dissenting minority, Hoar called
for more exacting words that would strike only at "the evil" associated
with "the coming of these people from China, especially the importation
of coolies." "It is not importation, but immigration; it is not importation,
but the free coming; it is not the slave, or the apprentice, or the prostitute,
or the leper, or the thief," he argued, "but the laborer at whom this
legislation strikes its blow.,,2
These congressional debates remind us of the extent to which slavery
continued to define American culture and politics after emancipation. The
language of abolition infused the proceedings on Chinese exclusion, with no
legislator challenging the federal government's legal or moral authority to
forbid "coolies" from entering the reunited, free nation. Indeed, by the
1880s, alongside the prostitute, there was no more potent symbol of chattel
slavery's enduring legacy than the "coolie," a racialized and racializing
figure that anti-Chinese (and putatively pro-Chinese) lawmakers condemned. 3
A stand against "coolies" was a stand for America, for freedom. There was
no disagreement on that point. The legal exclusion of Chinese laborers in
1882 and the subsequent barrage of anti-Asian laws reflected and exploited
this consensus in American culture and politics: "coolies" fell outside the
legitimate borders of the United States.
This consensus had taken root in the decades before the Civil War and
the abolition of slavery, a result not so much of anti-Chinese rancor in
California but of U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia and the Caribbean and
broader struggles to demarcate the legal boundary between slavery and
freedom. A year before Abraham Lincoln delivered the Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863, he had emblematized this consensus by
signing into law a bill designed to divorce "coolies" from America, a little
known legislation that reveals the complex origins of U.S. immigration
restrictions. While marking the origination of the modern immigration sys-
tem, Chinese exclusion also signified the culmination of preceding debates
over the slave trade and slavery, debates that had turned the attention of
proslavery and antislavery Americans not only to Africa and the U.S. South
but also to Asia and the Caribbean. There, conspicuously and tenuously at
the border between slavery and freedom, they discovered "coolies," upon
whom they projected their manifold desires. "Coolies," however, were not
a people but a conglomeration of racial imaginings that emerged worldwide
in the era of slave emancipation. 4 Ambiguously and then unfailingly linked
with slavery and the Caribbean in American culture, "coolies" would
 Outlawing "Coolies" I 13

eventually make possible the passage of the nation's first restrictions on

immigration under the banner of "freedom" and "immigration." The legal
and cultural impulse to prohibit "coolies," at home and abroad, also
enabled the U.S. nation-state to proclaim itself as "free" and to deepen and
defend its imperial presence in Asia and the Americas. Outlawing "coolies,"
in short, proved pivotal in the reproduction of race, nation, and empire in
the age of emancipation.

"Coolies" and Freedom

The word coolie was a product of European expansion into Asia and the
Americas, embodying the contradictory imperial imperatives of enslave-
ment and emancipation. Of Tamil, Chinese, or other origin, the term was
initially popularized in the sixteenth century by Portuguese sailors and mer-
chants across Asia and later was adopted by fellow European traders on the
high seas and in port cities. By the eighteenth century, coolie had assumed a
transcontinental definition of an Indian or Chinese laborer, hired locally or
shipped abroad. The word took on a new significance in the nineteenth
century, as the beginnings of abolition remade "coolies" into indentured
laborers in high demand across the world, particularly in the tropical
colonies of the Caribbean. Emerging out of struggles over British emancipa-
tion and Cuban slavery in particular, coolies and coolieism-defined as "the
importation of coolies as labourers into foreign countries" by the late
nineteenth century---came to denote the systematic shipment and employment
of Asian laborers on sugar plantations formerly worked by enslaved
Africans. s It was during this era of emancipation and Asian migration that
the term cooly entered the mainstream of American culture, symbolized
literally by its relocation from the appendix to the main body of Noah
Webster's American dictionary in 1848. 6
By then, like the word, the idea of importing "coolies" as indentured
laborers to combat the uncertainties of emancipation circulated widely
around the world. Even before the permanent end to slavery in the British
Empire in 1838, sugar planters from the French colony of Bourbon and
the British colony of Mauritius, both islands in the Indian Ocean, had
begun transporting South Asian workers to their plantations. These
initiatives inspired John Gladstone to inquire into the feasibility of
procuring a hundred "coolies" for at least five years of labor on his sugar
estates in British Guiana. Doubting that black "apprentices"-the status
forced upon former slaves for six years in 1834-would work much
longer, Gladstone contended that planters had "to endeavor to provide a
portion of other labourers whom we might use as a set-off, and when the
time for it comes, make us, as far as possible, independent of our negro
population." "Coolies" were his solution. A British firm foresaw no
difficulty in extending its business from Mauritius to the West Indies,
"the natives being perfectly ignorant of the place they go to or the length
of voyage they are undertaking." In May 1838, five months before
114 Moon-Ho Jung

"apprenticeship" came to a premature end, 396 South Asian "coolies"

arrived in British Guiana, launching a stream of migrant labor that
flowed until World War I. 7
What happened to the "Gladstone coolies," as they came to be known,
exposed a contradiction inherent in coolie ism that would bedevil and befud-
dle planters and government officials in the Americas for decades. Did the
recruitment and employment of "coolies" represent a relic of slavery or a
harbinger of freedom? Early reports decidedly indicated the former. Upon
receiving complaints registered by the British Anti-Slavery Society, British
Guiana authorities established a commission to investigate conditions on
the six plantations to which the "Gladstone coolies" had been allotted.
Witnesses testified that overseers brutally flogged and extorted money from
laborers under their supervision. By the end of their contracts in 1843, a
quarter of the migrants had died and the vast majority of the survivors
elected to return to India. Only sixty remained in British Guiana.
Undaunted, the colony's sugar planters proceeded with plans to expand the
experiment, but met resistance in India and London. The Indian governor-
general prohibited further emigration at the end of 1838, a policy that the
secretary for the colonies refused to amend in 1840. "I am not prepared to
encounter the responsibility of a measure which may lead to a dreadful loss
of life on the one hand," the secretary explained, "or, on the other, to a new
system of slavery."g
Such inauspicious beginnings failed to derail the mission that Gladstone
had inaugurated; West Indian planters soon found a sympathetic hearing in
London. They could have their migrant laborers, as long as the state regu-
lated all phases of recruitment, transportation, and employment. Applied to
African "immigrants"-those "liberated" from slave smugglers and pres-
sured into indentures hip-and then to Asian "coolies" in the 1840s, state
intervention was championed in British political circles as the guarantor of
freedom. For a time, despite persistent protests and investigations, the
employment of "coolies" appeared to signal a departure from the evils of
the slave trade, from coercion and servitude, sanctified by voluntary
contracts, legal rights, and public subsidies and enforced by the imperial and
colonial state apparatus. In practice, however, the system placed a prepon-
derance of power in the hands of planters and their allies, to the detriment
of indentured workers who faced criminal prosecution for violating civil
contracts. State enforcement on behalf of employers-along with rampant
extralegal practices like kidnapping, deception, and corporal punishment-
more often than not eclipsed state protection of workers. These contradic-
tions notwithstanding, London and the colonial regimes in India and the
West Indies worked together, albeit contentiously at times, to institute the
mass migration of laborers bound to five-year indentures as a mainstay of
postemancipation life by the 1860s. Coolieism thus became associated with
emancipation, but not even the highest aspirations of numerous inquiry
commissions and reform measures could erase its roots in slavery and
"apprenticeshi p. " 9
 Outlawing "Coolies" I 15

Meanwhile, Cuba, the Caribbean's premier sugar-producing colony in

the nineteenth century, magnified the contradictions presented by British
West Indian coolieism. Sugar planters there demanded laborers in numbers
and conditions that the illicit transatlantic slave trade-prohibited in Anglo-
Spanish treaties in 1817 and 1835 and in Spanish law in 1845-could no
longer supply by the 1840s, at least not without deep political and economic
costs. Following the British example, a Spanish merchant engaged in the
slave trade suggested the procurement of Chinese laborers in 1846, four
decades before slavery would be abolished in Cuba. Within a year, his firm
had made arrangements for two shiploads of "coolies" bound to eight-year
contracts with wages fixed at four pesos per month. This experiment
initiated and defined a migrant labor system that Cuban planters found
indispensable over the next two decades, especially as their recruiting
forays in Africa, Mexico, the Canary Islands, and elsewhere failed to yield
the results they had hoped for. Ultimately, almost 125,000 Chinese laborers
landed in Cuba between 1847 and 1874 to work under conditions approx-
imating slavery, unbeknownst to them and despite legal distinctions and
safeguards. Enslaved and indentured labor flourished side by side in Cuba,
casting chattel slavery's dark shadow over the "free" aspects of coolieism.lO
British authorities, in response, laid claim to moral superiority through state
intervention, in Mrica and India as well as in China, whence 17,904 laborers
arrived in the British West Indies under conditions similar to the larger system
involving close to half a million South Asian migrants.u
These developments on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico immediately
captured the notice of Americans engaged in their own struggles over slavery.
As in British denunciations of the Gladstone experiment, abolitionists
wasted no time in vilifying "coolie" labor as a new variant of slavery. New
England periodicals related to readers in the 1840s that "coolies" in the
British West Indies were "in a state of nudity and hardly any of them
decently clothed" and "suffering from severe sickness," with many com-
plaining vociferously and running away. The plight of the early "coolies"
was so miserable that "their belief is, that they are slaves" and "the negroes
appear sincerely to pity them." Trinidad's officials received and distributed
"coolies" like slaves "in pure Baltimore or Cuban style," Littell's Living Age
reported, while "coolies, half naked, scabby, famishing, helpless from igno-
rance, and overrun with vermin, infest the highways" of British Guiana.
"Coolies" faced a cycle of coercion in that colony, where "the authorities
have hounded on them ... drive[n] them into the lockup house, (surely an
illegal act,) and the planters cry out for permission to conclude contracts of
indenture, that is, with beguiled strangers, who cannot comprehend the
signification thereof." William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator hoped that
"the abolitionists of Great Britain will succeed in their efforts to break up
entirely a system that produces so much cruelty and misery."12
Within a few years though, Caribbean planters' and European officials'
propaganda campaigns had their desired effect on American reports, many
of which began touting "coolie" labor as a means to expedite and effect
116 Moon-Ho Jung

emancipation. Chinese emigration heralded a new era across the world,

exclaimed an advocate of Chinese labor, that would benefit "both the
Chinaman and the Negro, if you can at once relieve the hunger of the former
and preserve the freedom of the latter." Four years of Chinese migrants
residing in Cuba had proved them to be "laborious, robust-almost as
much so as the best Africans-more intelligent, and sufficiently docile,
under good management." Similar results prevailed in British Guiana and
Hawai'i, but would "prejudice or a mistaken philanthropy" prevent a
migration beneficial to all parties? Chinese dispersion across the globe and
American expansion across the Pacific and Asia would proceed apace, he
concluded. "Instead of the labor-market of the new empires of Oceanica
being supplied, like that of Eastern America, by means of violence, and with
the captive savages of Negroland, it will be voluntarily occupied by the free
and industrious outpourings of China." By 1852, the New York Times was
imploring U.S. slaveholders to emulate their competitors in the British West
Indies, Cuba, and Hawai'i, presenting "coolies" as a conduit toward abolition.
"Some happy medium must be struck," an editorial insisted, "and the only
medium between forced and voluntary labor, is that offered by the
introduction of Orientals."13 Neither free nor enslaved labor, "coolies"
signified an ambiguous contradiction that seemed to hold the potential to
advance either.

"Coolies" and Slavery

Humphrey Marshall, the U.S. commissioner to China, likewise felt that
"coolies" would spell the end of American slavery. "Should that power
[Britain] seriously undertake to populate her West India possessions and
her colonies on the coast of South America with Chinese laborers, who
have no idea, however, of the right of popular participation in the direction
of government," he informed the secretary of state in 1853, "the
effect ... upon the industrial interests of the planting States of the United
States, and upon the institutions of the republics of South America, must
necessarily be most disastrous to them." Marshall, a Kentucky planter and
a future member of the Confederate military and congress, estimated that
each Chinese contract laborer cost $80 per year to employ, "far below the
cost of slave labor, independent of the risk which the planter runs in his
original investment." The Chinese were "patient of labor, tractable, obedient
as a slave, and frugal ... [and] will compel from the earth the maximum
production of which it is capable, and, under whatever circumstances, will
create a competition against which it must be difficult to struggle." On
behalf of American slaveholders, Marshall hoped the president would
establish a policy to prevent American ships from advancing the profits of
British interests, against whom the United States was competing in the
production of tropical goods and Asian commerce. "Coolies," he was
convinced, threatened both American imperial ambitions and American
slavery. 14
 Outlawing "Coolies" I 17

Marshall articulated a short-lived ideological convergence between u.s.

diplomats and slaveholders that would decisively bind "coolies" with
slavery in American culture. In the years following his appeal, U.s. officials
stationed abroad cast "coolie" labor not only as cheaper than slavery but as
a brutal form of slavery that demanded federal intervention. Proslavery
ideologues heartily agreed, even as they bristled at the notion of federal
meddling in the domestic institution of slavery. The advent of a new system
of slavery after emancipation in the Caribbean, they argued, warranted
international scorn and laid bare the duplicity of abolition. American
slavery, in their view, deserved protection more than ever. On the eve of the
Civil War, New England abolitionists and Southern fire-eaters could find
common ground in the "coolie" problem, issuing equally strident condem-
nations that clarified and blurred the limits of slavery and freedom in the
process. American calls for the prohibition of "coolie" labor abroad, in
turn, also justified and fueled u.s. expansionism in Asia and the Caribbean.
Joining the international movement to suppress the "coolie" trade legit-
imized the u.s. diplomatic mission in China; the abuse of "coolies" in Cuba
seemed to affirm the need for American annexation of the Spanish colony,
for many, as a slave state. In and through "coolies," American diplomats
and slaveholders found ways to promote the U.S. empire, as a beacon of
freedom and slavery in the age of emancipation.
Marshall's admonition against the "coolie" trade conveyed America's
long-standing commercial aspirations in China, an economic motive that
was in full display in response to the tragedy aboard the U.S. ship Robert
Bowne.15 In 1852, Captain Lesley Bryson transported a cargo of contract
laborers to Hawai'i and then returned to Amoy the following month to
carry another 410 "coolies," ostensibly to San Francisco. On the tenth day
out at sea, the Chinese passengers rebelled against the officers and crew,
killing Bryson and six others and ordering the surviving crew members to
guide the ship to Formosa. Instead, the ship ran aground near a small island
on the Ryuku archipelago, to which American and British ships were dis-
patched to round up as many of the "pirates" as possible. Most of the
Chinese passengers were never accounted for-only about a hundred were
captured-and hundreds probably died from gunshot wounds, suicide,
starvation, and disease, in addition to the eight who had been killed during
the original insurrection. Peter Parker, the charge d'affaires of the U.S.
delegation in China, conceded that Bryson had administered "injudicious
treatment of the coolies"-such as his order to cut off their queues-but
insisted that recent mutinies by "this class of Chinese" aboard French and
English ships indicated that the uprising might have been "premeditated
before the vessel left port."16
The mounting evidence against the American captain and the "coolie"
trade in general had no effect on Parker's blind defense of his deceased
compatriot and U.S. national honor. Bryson's ship was involved in an inten-
sifying trade in Chinese workers around Amoy operated by European and
American shippers and their local suppliers, Chinese brokers (or "crimps").
I 18 Moon-Ho Jung

The insatiable global demand for "coolies" manifested locally in an upsurge

of kidnappings and fraudulent schemes in the early 1850s, coercive tactics
that drove Chinese residents to equate the trade with "pig-dealing."17 The
growing infamy of the "coolie" trade in Amoy could not deter Parker's
quest for justice on Bryson's behalf. Although he claimed U.S. jurisdiction
over the entire affair, Parker agreed to hand over seventeen individuals,
those deemed the "principal actors" by a court of inquiry aboard a U.S.
frigate, to Chinese authorities for a speedy trial and punishment. A month
later, however, Parker regretted the "most flagrant breach of good faith"
committed by the Chinese commissioners who, from the testimony of the
accused, had censured Bryson for engaging in "the style of thing called
buying pigs" and treating his passengers in a "tyrannical" manner. Only one
man was found guilty. The u.s. official angrily defended Bryson as "a kind
and humane man" and dismissed the suggestion that the passengers had
been coerced into signing contracts. "Hereafter the United States will exe-
cute their own laws in cases of piracy occurring upon the high seas," Parker
declared. 18
But the violence aboard Robert Bowne turned out to be no exception.
U.S. officials in Asia dispatched frightening accounts of the trade that
Americans back home read about, including the infamous case of the
Boston-based Waverly. In September 1855, the Waverly left Amoy with 353
"coolies" and added 97 others in Swatow before embarking on its chartered
voyage to Peru. Within a short span, four passengers had "sprung over-
board" and drowned, while a "good many" fell ill, among them the captain,
who died soon afterward. Under the circumstances, the first mate, now the
acting captain, decided to switch course to the Philippines. Two more
"coolies" died before the ship reached Manila, where Spanish authorities
placed it under quarantine. Difficult to control from the outset, the new cap-
tain wrote in his log, "all of the coolies came aft, with the intention to kill"
him two days later. The crew killed "about four or five" in the ensuing
struggle and "drove them all down below, between decks"; the captain later
killed another "very impudent" passenger. When the other "coolies"
attempted to break through the forward hatch, the crew "shoved them
down again and shut the hatches on again." When the captain finally
decided to allow the passengers on deck eight hours later, he discovered a
grisly scene below. Only 150 "coolies" remained alive. The captain's
account of "coolies" attacking him and then killing one another, however,
could not be corroborated by witnesses, who testified that he had killed and
injured the passengers without provocation. The U.S. consul in Manila
reported that "the unfortunate beings had perished by suffocation.,,19
Amid such calamities, U.S. officials moved to prevent American citizens
from transporting "coolies," a trade that appeared to threaten America's
commercial access to China and its international standing. Four years after
his defense of the Robert Bowne, Peter Parker heard about the Waverly
disaster en route to take up his appointment as the new U.S. commissioner
to China. Armed with verbal instructions from the secretary of state to
 Outlawing "Coolies" I 19

"discountenance" the "coolie" trade, he wasted no time in issuing a

strong "public notification" in January 1856. Parker denounced the trade
as "replete with illegalities, immoralities, and revolting and inhuman
atrocities, strongly resembling those of the African slave trade in former
years, some of them exceeding the horrors of the 'middle passage,' ... and
the foreign name has been rendered odious by this traffic, hundreds and
thousands of lives having been inhumanly sacrificed." Parker instructed
u.s. citizens "to desist from this irregular and immoral traffic" that imper-
iled "amicable relations" and "honorable and lawful commerce" between
the United States and China, whose government prohibited it. Parker's
proclamation generated immediate public outcries back home that further
coupled "coolies" with the banned African slave trade. The abolitionist
Liberator featured articles on the "new slave trade" and chastised
Northerners engaged in it as "doughfaces." And departing from its earlier
depiction of "coolies" as a vehicle to free labor, the New York Times now
hoped the federal government would sustain Parker's declaration "with
corresponding vigor" and suppress "this abominable trade.,,20
William B. Reed would reinforce Parker's views shortly after being
appointed the new U.S. minister to China in 1857. Reed, too, found that
shippers blatantly disregarded his public intimidations and general allusions
to Chinese and U.S. laws and treaty obligations. In January 1858, he
decided to fortify his warnings with a federal statute already on the books,
an 1818 law that prohibited U.S. citizens and residents from transporting
from Africa or anywhere else "any negro, mulatto, or person of colour, not
being an inhabitant, nor held to service by the laws of either of the states or
territories of the United States, in any ship, vessel, boat, or other water craft,
for the purpose of holding, selling, or otherwise disposing of, such person as
a slave, or to be held to service or labour, or be aiding or abetting therein."
Despite "some uncertainty" of its applicability and its original intent for
"a different evil," Reed argued for the law's relevance. A "Chinese cooly,"
he rationalized, was surely "a man of color, to be disposed of to be held to
service in Cuba."21
In contrast to Parker, who had distinguished between the illegality of the
"coolie trade" and the legality of "voluntary emigration of Chinese
adventurers," Reed felt that "coolies" raised questions far more significant
than coercion. It was, to him, a matter of U.S. racial, national, and imperial
interests. Beyond "the practical enslavement of a distant and most peculiar
race," the prospect of mass migrations of "free" Chinese male laborers also
troubled Reed. Such a demographic shift, he believed, would strengthen
"the decaying institutions of colonial Spanish America" that ran contrary to
U.S. interests. The Chinese would "either amalgamate with the negro race,
and thus increase the actual slave population, or maintain a separate exis-
tence, their numbers only to be recruited by new arrivals." Reed thought the
latter more likely and envisaged a "bloody massacre" borne from the
oppression of "a vast aggregation of troublesome populace" in a foreign
colony. Driven to prevent such a scenario, he stressed to shippers that
120 Moon-Ho Jung

"whether the coolies go voluntarily or not to Havana" did not make "the
least difference" under the law, if they were transported "under a contract
'to be held to service.' "22 In his search for a law to suppress the coercive and
corrupt trade in "coolies," Reed turned to a slave trade prohibition that, in
turn, defined a "coolie." A "coolie," in his mind, was "a man of color"
shipped to labor abroad, a gendered, racialized, and classed figure whose
migration, voluntary or not, signified the bounds of slavery.
Reed left his post in November 1858, months before federal officials in
Washington rescinded his application of the 1818 statute to the "coolie"
trade. Secretary of State Lewis Cass, who criticized British and French
efforts to obtain "coolie" and African labor for their colonies, had referred
Reed's concerns to Attorney General J. S. Black in April 1858. Black finally
ruled almost a year later that he considered the "coolie" trade outside the
purview of slave trade prohibitions and other "existing laws." "The evil is
one which Congress alone can remedy," he concluded. Washington's
delayed and deflective reply provided little comfort or direction to the u.S.
legation in China that continued to witness the horrors of the trade first-
hand. The "cooly trade to the West Indies," Reed had pleaded repeatedly,
was "irredeemable slavery under the form of freedom," with results worse
than the African slave trade. The "Asiatic" faced a doomed fate in the
Caribbean, he prophesied, marked by racial isolation and "a certain and
fatal struggle, in which the Asiatic, as the weakest, fails."23 To U.S.
diplomats in China, it was a matter of life and death, a matter of slavery and
freedom.
By 1859, the "coolie" trade from China, in which u.S. clippers had
become increasingly involved, generated diplomatic crises that both
undermined and bolstered Western imperial designs in China. Popular
outrage in southern China against kidnapping and deception, sometimes
boiling over into mass antiforeigner riots, drove the Chinese imperial
court to request assistance from Western diplomats to suppress a trade
that flagrantly violated its prohibition against all emigration. The
British-motivated by West Indian planters' demand for labor and
London's desire to protect its international image-requested a legalized
and regulated system of migration instead. The military occupation of
Canton (Guangzhou) by British and French troops beginning in 1858
allowed them to exact such a system. Long aware that the imperial decree
on emigration carried no weight among Western shippers, Chinese officials
in Canton felt empowered and compelled to collaborate with the British to
implement a more pragmatic policy. In November 1859, British and local
Chinese motives coalesced into a system of voluntary contract migration
to the British West Indies from licensed depots in Canton, with regulations
intended to avert the violence heretofore employed in the recruitment of
"coolies." Lao Ch'ung-kuang, the provincial governor general of
Guangdong, then called on other foreign consuls to instruct their citizens
to conduct all emigration through Canton under the same guidelines. British
and French troops subsequently headed north to Peking (Beijing) and
 Outlawing "Coolies" 121

Figure 5.1 Many U.S. news accounts condemned the inhumanity of the "coolie" trade. From
Edgar Holden, "A Chapter on the Coolie Trade," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 29 (June
1864): 5.
Source: Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

Figure 5.2 They also dehumanized "coolies." From Edgar Holden, "A Chapter on the Coolie
Trade," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 29 (June 1864): 10.
Source: Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

pressured the imperial court to recognize the right of Chinese subjects to

emigrate to foreign lands in October 1860. 24
The regulatory promise of freedom, however, proved illusory, driving
U.S. diplomats to lobby more than ever for a new federal law to suppress
what they considered a new slave trade. At Lao's insistence, John E. Ward,
a Georgia Democrat who replaced Reed, lent his support to inspecting U.S.
122 Moon-Ho Jung

vessels docked near but beyond Canton's city limits. The testimony of
hundreds of Chinese aboard one particular ship, the secretary of the u.s.
legation reported, "exhibited a dismal uniformity of the acts of deception,
violence, intimidation, and crafty devices practiced by native crimps, to
beguile or force them to go on board boats where they were compelled to
assent to the demands of their captors, and go with them on board ship or
to the barracoons at Macao." Although these particular passengers won
their release, Ward and his consuls could do nothing as the American
captain proceeded to Macao, a Portuguese colony, and picked up another
shipload of "coolies" for Cuba, a Spanish colony. Ward wished for a law to
place such cases under his authority, since neither the Canton system nor
consular inspection seemed adequate to the task. "When the consul visits
the ships to examine into their condition," he noted, "they are questioned
under the painful recollection of what they had already suffered, and what
they must still endure if a ready assent to emigrate is not given. "25 The
United States had an obligation to outlaw "coolies" on American ships,
Ward and his predecessors urged, for the sake of free labor and free trade.
Excepting U.S. diplomats in China, no group of Americans studied and
criticized the transport of "coolies" to the Caribbean more assiduously than
Southern proslavery ideologues. They, however, drew conclusions that had
little to do with ending coercive practices in Asia and the Caribbean; rather,
their obsession with the Caribbean and "coolies" developed into a defense
of slavery and a rebuttal to abolitionism. The racial and economic failings
of emancipation and coolieism, pros lavery forces argued, confirmed the
natural order of slavery, an order that fanatical abolitionists and politicians
had destroyed in the Caribbean. While U.S. officials in China appealed for
a federal legislation to suppress the "coolie" trade, slavery's supporters
emphasized the futility of state intervention in matters concerning race and
labor. American slavery, they asserted, protected the nation from the utter
decay experienced in the Caribbean and thereby justified its renewal
through new importations from Africa and its expansion southward to
Cuba and beyond. Their arguments led to neither but contributed to the
emerging consensus in antebellum America that "coolie" labor was an evil
to be expunged from America's ships and shores.
Not long after the legal end of slavery in the British Empire, American
slavery's defenders charged again and again that abolition heralded a new
era of duplicity and hypocrisy, characterized by semantic games rather than
genuine humanitarianism. British imperial authorities had imposed the slave
trade and slavery upon their colonies in North America, the United States
Magazine claimed, and now ruled over millions of "absolute slaves" in
India and elsewhere. Worse yet, they continued deceptively to sell "negroes"
into slavery as "immigrants" and inaugurated "the blackest and worst
species of slavery" by transporting "Indian Coolies" to the West Indies.
"Humane and pious contrivance!" James Henry Hammond accused the
British in his widely circulated letters in defense of slavery. "To alleviate the
fancied sufferings of the accursed posterity of Ham, you sacrifice, by a cruel
 Outlawing "Coolies" 123

death, two-thirds of the children of the blessed Shem, and demand

the applause of Christians, the blessing of Heaven!" Under the ruse of
"immigration," Hammond added emphatically, "THE AFRICAN SLAVE
TRADE HAS BEEN ACTUALLY REVIVED UNDER THE AUSPICES
AND PROTECTION OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT." West Indian
emancipation was a "magnificent farce" that his "humanity" and American
slavery's "full and growing vigor" could not allow on U.S. soil. Reverend
Josiah Priest likewise castigated the British for "inveigling ... a yellow,
swarthy race" to labor on the other side of the world, a system at odds with
"their seemingly noble generosity in manumitting their slaves" but consistent
with their recent indenturing of "the negro"-"ignorant" of legal contracts
as a "monkey"-in Africa. 26
New Orleans-based journalist J. D. B. De Bow was perhaps the most
influential figure to incorporate British hypocrisy, conspiracy, and degener-
acy into the pros lavery argument. Great Britain had been the greatest slave
dealer in history, he argued, whose conscience turned to "philanthropy"
only out of economic self-interest. His conspiracy theory of emancipation
was straightforward: "Liberate your West India slaves; force them [other
nations], as you can then, to liberate theirs, and you have the monopoly of
the world!" And exposes of the "wide-spread evils" of Caribbean coolieisms
became integral to De Bow's derision of British emancipation and defense of
American slavery. Emancipation reverted former slaves to "a state of Pagan
cannibalism" in the West Indies and drove up the prices of tropical products
in Europe, conditions that "made fillibusters [sic] and buccaneers of more
than half of christendom." British and Northern abolitionists, De Bow
reported, were now shipping "Coolies and Africans" in a "new system" that
was "attended with ten times as much of crime and sacrifice of human life"
as the slave trade and slavery. Government and newspaper reports on the
Robert Bowne, Waverly, and other disasters, which he quoted extensively,
illustrated the "enormities" being committed everyday in Asia and the
Caribbean.27
To De Bow, the Caribbean demonstrated the moral superiority of the U.S.
South and the dire consequences of interfering in the racial order. The
"humane conduct" of American slaveholders, he argued, "preserved"
human life and the four million American slaves deserved to be spared "the
risk of being exposed to evils" characteristic of other plantation societies.
After surveying the various migrant contract labor systems of British,
French, and Spanish tropical colonies, particularly the "truly frightful"
mortality rates on ships and plantations, De Bow asked how they could be
accorded "the specious title of free labor": "What is the plain English of the
whole system? Is it not just this?-that the civilized and powerful races of
the earth have discovered that the degraded, barbarous, and weak races,
may be induced voluntarily to reduce themselves to a slavery more cruel
than any that has yet disgraced the earth, and that humanity may compound
with its conscience, by pleading that the act is one of free will?" Platitudes
on "humane principles" and "righteous decrees" might be "all very
124 Moon-Ho Jung

plausible and very soothing to the conscience" but the truth, he believed,
exposed the unconscionable hypocrisy of abolitionism. De Bow demanded
that "decisive means" be taken "to arrest this evil in its infancy," lest the
entire world be cursed with the "ineradicable evils" of the "coolie" trade,
including the specter of race wars between "half savages and half-civilized
idolators" in the tropics. Although slavery protected the South for the
moment, he concluded, "a successful insurrection of the negroes" incited by
abolitionists would prove "an enormous impulse" toward the introduction
of "coolies" to the United States. 28
If freedom could be worse than slavery, as De Bow insisted, other
proslavery propagandists such as Daniel Lee wondered how "immigration,"
as understood and practiced in the Caribbean, might revitalize the institution
of slavery in the United States. "Without making the disastrous sacrifice
that ruined the planting colonies," Lee proposed, "we may, if it be wise to
do so, import Coolies or Africans, under reasonable contracts to serve for a
term of years as apprentices, or hirelings, and then be conveyed back to the
land of their nativity." The system would not only fill the South's demand
for "a muscular force worthy of its destiny," he argued, but also civilize Asia
and Africa as these "pupils" returned home, enlightened. His ultimate
objective, however, was to reopen the transatlantic slave trade, a movement
that witnessed a resurgence in the late 1850s. By 1858, Lee abandoned the
idea of recruiting new races of laborers and advocated the sole importation
of "African immigrants" under fourteen-year indentures or longer, as
Louisiana legislators were then considering. He claimed that the system,
once begun, would convert Northerners to the wisdom of Southern ways,
allowing the extension of "the term of the African apprenticeship from
fourteen years to the duration of his natural life." Lee's reasoning was, in
effect, the mirror image of William Reed's attempt to apply the slave trade
laws to the "coolie" trade: since the "coolie" trade and Mrican "immigration"
to the Caribbean were like the banned African slave trade, the slave trade
itself ought to be legalized. Prominent pros lavery thinkers such as George
Fitzhugh agreed wholeheartedly.29
The drive to enslave peoples, at the same time, did not stop pros lavery
forces from imagining themselves and their nation as liberators-would-be
liberators of "coolies" across the oceans as much as U.S. diplomats. U.S.
expansionism in the Caribbean, they suggested, would result in the deliver-
ance of slaves and "coolies" from backward despots. Representative
Thomas L. Clingman of North Carolina, for example, attempted to shed
light on "how this system of transporting and selling into slavery these
Coolies is managed by Great Britain and Spain," to drum up congressional
support for a more aggressive policy toward "our American Mediterranean"
in peril. The mass importation of Chinese "coolies," Mayan Indians, and
Africans intermixing with "the present black and mongrel population," he
argued, threatened to make Cuba and other islands "desolate," the perma-
nent "abode of savages." Instead, some "Norman or South-man fillibuster
[sic]" ought to go down and force "Cuffee" to produce tropical goods,
 Outlawing "Coolies" 125

"which Providence seems to have intended these islands to yield for the
benefit of mankind." Senator John Slidell of Louisiana likewise called for
the u.S. acquisition of Cuba. In January 1859, he presented a bill to that
effect on behalf of the Committee on Foreign Relations, whose accompany-
ing report forecast the humanitarian and financial benefits to come. The
United States would put an end to the slave and "coolie" trades-the latter
of which resulted in mortality rates and suffering "far worse" than slav-
ery-and thereby improve the value and treatment of Cuban slaves and
allow American slaveholders to dominate the world sugar market. 3D
The pros lavery argument's critique of Caribbean coolieisms, at the least,
frustrated abolitionist attempts to draw sharp contrasts between slavery and
freedom and revealed the complex global ties that slavery and coolieism had
forged. Developments in Europe, the British West Indies, Cuba, India,
China, and Africa produced new anxieties and hopes that informed and
challenged universalizing notions. Were the British West Indies really free
after emancipation? Weren't Asian and African immigrations merely legal-
ized slave importations? The transport and employment of "coolies" in the
Caribbean rendered such questions-whether in diplomatic correspondence
from Asia or proslavery pronouncements from the Old South-beyond a
black-and-white issue. Initially cast as the "free" advancement from coerced
labor, "coolies" came to epitomize slavery in the United States at a time
when the national crisis over slavery was about to erupt in open warfare.
On the eve of the Civil War, the "coolie" and slave trades had become so
intertwined in American culture that an encyclopedic entry for "Slaves and
Slave-Trade" devoted a section exclusively to the "Coolie Trade."31 The
project of outlawing "coolies" could not be extricated from the national
war over slavery.

Importation and Immigration

The convergent and contrasting denunciations of "coolies" by American
diplomats and slaveholders generated simultaneous but distinct initiatives
to outlaw "coolies" on U.S. vessels and on U.S. soil. Representative
Thomas D. Eliot, a Republican from Massachusetts, led the legislative cam-
paign in the U.S. Congress to ban American participation in the "coolie"
trade, beginning with the publication of his report on behalf of the
Committee on Commerce in 1860. Encapsulating the frustrations and
aspirations of U.S. diplomats in China far more than those of proslavery
critics, Eliot and his associates took great pains to distinguish between the
status of "coolies" in the British colonies and Cuba. The transport and
employment of "East Indian coolies" in British Guiana, Trinidad, and
Mauritius, the report argued, were characterized by voluntary contracts
and government supervision that obviated outside interference. Chinese
migration to California was also "voluntary and profitable mutually to the
contracting parties" and, in any case, already subject to federal statutes on pas-
senger ships. The "Chinese coolie trade" to Cuba, on the other hand, was
126 Moon-Ho Jung

categorically unique and warranted immediate congressional action. That

particular trade was "unchristian and inhuman, disgraceful to the merchant
and the master, oppressive to the ignorant and betrayed laborers, a reproach
upon our national honor, and a crime before God as deeply dyed as that
piracy which forfeits life when the coasts of Africa supply its victims."
Though targeting "American shipmasters and northern owners" engaged in
a trade "as barbarous as the African slave trade"-not Southern slavehold-
ers-the timing and language of the report obviously underscored Eliot's
broader antislavery message. 32
Consistent with a longstanding American rebuke of Cuba as morally
backward, the report's geopolitical boundaries also reflected the Republican
Party's growing faith in nation-state authority and enduring hope for a peace-
ful end to slavery. The British Empire stood for state protection, progress, and
freedom; the Spanish Empire exemplified state failure, stagnation, and slavery.
Antislavery forces therefore vigorously contrasted what the New York
Times called the "Chinese Coolie-trade" to Cuba and Peru and the "Hindoo
Coolie trade" to the British West Indies, which was "not the ally, but the
enemy of Slavery." The "East-India Coolies, taken to the British Islands,"
John S. C. Abbott wrote in his antislavery tract, seemed to "have their
rights carefully protected by the British government," whereas "in Cuba
the Coolie trade is merely a Chinese slave-trade under the most fraudulent
and cruel circumstances." Juxtaposing the "human misery" in Cuba
against the "joy and gratitude" in postemancipation British West Indies,
Abbott prayed that "the execrable institution" of slavery would "speedily
go down" in the United States, "but not in a sea of flame and blood."33
State regulation and supervision, it seemed, would guarantee and, in
essence, define freedom for all.
Slavery's defenders had no patience to draw distinctions among
Caribbean coolieisms and demanded the exclusion of "coolies" from
America's shores so as to preserve domestic slavery. Between Lincoln's
election and inauguration-and during the secession of one state after
another-proslavery unionists desperately turned to the Caribbean and
"coolies" to sustain their lost cause, with President James Buchanan going
so far as to propose the acquisition of Cuba. At a convention called to draft
a constitutional amendment to avert a war in February 1861, a delegate
from New York recommended the preservation of slavery as a state institu-
tion and ridiculed its abolition in England and France. "True, they have
abolished slavery by name," he argued, "but they have imported appren-
tices from Africa, and Coolies from Asia, and have placed them under the
worst form of slavery ever known." In considering a provision to prohibit
the importation of slaves from abroad, the convention added the phrase "or
coolies, or persons held to service or labor" upon the suggestion of a
Kentucky delegate, who contended that "the importation of coolies and
other persons from China and the East" was "the slave-trade in one of its
worst forms.,,34
 Outlawing "Coolies" 127

In a fracturing nation, those who were fighting hardest to uphold slavery

attempted to criminalize "coolie" importations first. In March 1861,
congressional leaders of the compromise movement proposed multiple
drafts of a constitutional amendment that included the retention of slavery
below the 36°30' parallel line and the prohibition of the "foreign slave
trade" involving "the importation of slaves, coolies, or persons held to
service or labor, into the United States and the Territories from places
beyond the limits thereof." At the same moment in Mobile, Alabama, the
constitutional convention of the Confederate States of America considered
an identical clause against "the importation of slaves, coolies, or persons
held to service or labor into the Confederate States and their Territories,
from any places beyond the limits thereof." Politicians on opposing sides of
the secession crisis figured that the preemptive exclusion of "coolies" would
shore up slavery in the South. 35
Antislavery Republicans also moved to put a stop to "coolie" importa-
tions during the first year of the Civil War. After settling for congressional
resolutions requesting more documents from Buchanan and then Lincoln,
Eliot and his allies renewed their attempt to disengage Americans from the
"coolie" trade in the now Republican-dominated Congress. Upon the
receipt of the Lincoln administration's report on the "Asiatic coolie trade"
in December 1861, which attested to the violence of the trade and the failure
of government inspection, Eliot proposed an amended bill (H.R. 109) for
the House's consideration and pleaded for its passage. Aside from proce-
dural objections to his earlier bill, Eliot argued, he had heard only "a solitary
objection" to it from his colleagues. "I refer to Mr. [Henry C.] Burnett [of
Kentucky], who is now doing what he can to pull down the Government
which he was then under oath to sustain and support," he explained, "and
that objection, as I recollect it, was based simply upon the assertion
that ... it might by possibility affect some of his constituents who, as he
declared, had some cooly laborers upon their plantations." The House
passed the bill. 36
The Senate then made a significant modification to Eliot's bill. Senator
John C. Ten Eyck of New Jersey recommended on behalf of his chamber's
Committee on Commerce that the phrase "against their will and without their
consent" be struck from H.R. 109. "The committee are of opinion that
the cooly trade should be prohibited altogether," Ten Eyck argued. "They are
of opinion that persons of this description should not be transported from
their homes and sold, under any circumstances; being, as is well known, an
inferior race, the committee are of the opinion that these words will afford
very little protection to this unfortunate class of people." His racial and moral
argument carried the day. The Senate passed the bill with Ten Eyck's amend-
ment; the House concurred two weeks later. And in the throes of military and
political battles over slavery, Lincoln signed" An Act to Prohibit the 'Coolie
Trade' by American Citizens in American Vessels" in February 1862.37
The final version of the bill reproduced the racial logic of the age of
emancipation that made the practical enforcement of prohibiting the
128 Moon-Ho Jung

"coolie" trade a confusing and impossible endeavor. What exactly consti-

tuted a "coolie"? And could one ever be emancipated from the status of a
"coolie"? The new law answered neither question. Its first section prohibited
U.S. citizens and residents from acting as

master, factor, owner, or otherwise, [tol build, equip, load, or otherwise

prepare, any ship or vessel ... for the purpose of procuring from China ... or
from any other port or place the inhabitants or subjects of China, known as
"coolies," to be transported to any foreign country, port, or place whatever, to
be disposed of, or sold, or transferred, for any term of years or for any time
whatever, as servants or apprentices, or to be held to service or labor.

It was from this section that Ten Eyck removed the words "against their will
and without their consent," a clause that might have classified "coolies"
more conclusively. Instead, the legislation simply outlawed any shipment of
Chinese subjects "known as 'coolies' " abroad "to be held to service or
labor." Virtually all Chinese subjects leaving China were known as
"coolies." But another section of the law left the door open to Chinese
migrations, proclaiming that "any free and voluntary emigration of any
Chinese subject" should proceed unabated so long as a u.s. consul attested
to the voluntary status of the migrant through a written certificate. 38The
two sections presumably went hand in hand. The United States deplored the
importation of human beings; it embraced immigration.

Anti-"Coolie" Legacies
Reflective of the 1862 anti-"coolie" law's ongms in wider debates over
slavery, postbellum legal battles over its application took place in the U.S.
South and its leading antebellum slave market and port city, New Orleans.
With the abolition of slavery and the prospect of black enfranchisement,
former slaveholders and their allies now looked to the Caribbean and
"coolies" for political and economic salvation. A refrain uttered across the
region after the war, a journalist reported, was: "We can drive the niggers
out and import coolies that will work better, at less expense, and relieve us
from this cursed nigger impudence." Alarmed by such brash talk, federal
officials responded without delay when the U.S. consulate in Havana
reported in 1867 that "certain parties in the State of Louisiana ... [were]
engaged in the business of importing into that state from this Island Chinese
or coolies under contracts to serve on stipulated wages for a specified time."
The U.S. attorney in New Orleans was dispatched immediately to intercept
an American brig en route that was reportedly carrying passengers
"purchased" from their Cuban "masters" and signed to contracts establishing
"the relation of slavery or servitude." Although the vessel was unquestion-
ably transporting twenty-three Chinese subjects "known as 'coolies' ... to
be held to service or labor" in Louisiana, the U.S. attorney eventually
decided to dismiss the case. The failure to obtain consular certificates
 Outlawing "Coolies" 129

notwithstanding, he decided, the brig's captain had believed the "coolies" to

be "free agents. "39
The law's creators never contemplated a conflict between the two
provisions on "coolies" and "immigrants," rendering its legal enforcement
ineffective but its cultural effects enduring. When a labor recruiter from the
South requested consular certificates to ship nearly two hundred Chinese
workers from Hong Kong to New Orleans in 1869, the local U.S. consul
was baffled. "What constitutes a free and voluntary emigrant?" he asked
the secretary of state. "What is a 'Coolie' as here defined, and what is a free
emigrant?" Discovering that his superiors knew no better and that the
passengers appeared to be voluntary, he issued the certificates. 4o If the law
did little to stem Chinese migrations to the United States, including to a
region vocally demanding "coolies," the racial and cultural logic behind it-
that "coolies," in contrast to "immigrants," embodied slavery after
emancipation-suffused almost every political debate on Chinese migration.
When Senator Charles Sumner tried to remove the word white from U.S.
naturalization laws in 1870, for instance, his opponents dwelled on the
racial image of "coolies" overwhelming the United States back to slavery.
"These people are brought here under these infamous coolie contracts," a
Nevada Republican exclaimed, "the same contracts that have disgraced
humanity in the taking of these poor people to the West India islands and
various portions of South America as slaves." As Sumner's resolution went
down in defeat, unanimous condemnations of "coolies" echoed universal
applause for "immigrants," defined explicitly and implicitly as hailing solely
from Europe. The act of outlawing "coolies" racialized "immigrants" as
decidedly white and European in American culture, negating the legal space
afforded to "free and voluntary" Chinese migrants. 41
For decades preceding and following the passage of the 1862 law,
"coolies" occupied the legal and cultural borderland between slavery and
freedom, signifying and enabling critical transitions in U.S. history. The
1862 law, unambiguously framed as an antislavery measure by Eliot and
others, established a precedent that few politicians would or could resist.
What was, in effect, the last slave trade law would lead to a litany of immi-
gration laws, including the Page Law of 1875 and the Chinese Exclusion Act
of 1882, ostensibly targeting "coolies" (and prostitutes) in the name of
"immigrants" and freedom. And the perceived existence of coolieism and
other forms of bondage-and the moral imperative to prohibit slavery-
infected and rationalized U.S. expansionism abroad, from China and Cuba
in the 1850s to the Philippines in the 1890s. 42 Locating, defining, and
outlawing "coolies" ultimately evolved into an endless and indispensable
exercise that facilitated and justified a series of historical transitions-from
slave trade laws to racially coded immigration laws, from a slaveholding
nation to a "nation of immigrants," and from a continental empire of
"manifest destiny" to a liberating empire across the seas. The violent and
mythical legacies of those transitions would go a long way toward defining
race, nation, and empire in the twentieth century and beyond.
I 30 Moon-Ho Jung

Notes
Moon-Ho Jung is an associate professor of history at the University of Washington,
Seattle, and the author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of
Emancipation (2006). He is currently working on a book on antiradicalism, anti-Asian
racism, and Asian American political struggles from the 1890s to the 1930s. He wishes to
thank Tefi Lamson, Moon-Kie Jung, Lisa Lowe, Jodi Melamed, Chandan Reddy, Leti
Volpp, Alys Weinbaum, and fellows at the Simpson Center for the Humanities for reading
and commenting on earlier drafts.
1. Congressional Record, 47th Congress, 1st session, 1482, 1581, 1932, 1936.
2. Ibid., 1934, 1517.
3. On the figure of the prostitute, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract:
Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 218-63.
4. Scholars of Asian American history all too often stress that Asians in the United
States were "immigrants" and not "coolies," presumed to be those coerced to move
to the Caribbean (see, for example, Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different
Shore: A History of Asian Americans [Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company,
1989], 35-36). The habitual assertion of this false binary-"coolies" versus
"immigrants" -not only reifies "coolies" and American exceptionalism, but also
ironically reproduces the logic and rhetoric of nineteenth-century debates on
whether or not Asians in the United States were, in fact, "coolies." No one, in the
United States or the Caribbean, was really a "coolie."
5. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 891-92;
Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas,
1830-1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974),41-43; Robert L. Irick, Ch'ing
Policy toward the Coolie Trade, 1847-1878 (Taipei: Chinese Materials Center,
1982), 2-6; Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian
Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
2001),71-72.
6. The term cooly, defined as an "East Indian porter or carrier," had first appeared in
1842. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York:
White and Sheffield, 1842), 953; Noah Webster and Chauncey A. Goodrich,
An American Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield: George and Charles
Merriam, 1848),264.
7. Alan H. Adamson, Sugar without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana,
1838-1904 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 41-42 (Gladstone
quoted on 41); Tinker, A New System, 61-63 (quote on 63).
8. Tinker, A New System (quote v), 69-70; Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 42-43;
Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants
to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993), 109, 156-57; Dwarka Nath, A History of Indians in British Guiana
(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1950), 8-21.
9. See, for example: Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 44-56, 104-53; Look Lai,
Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 16, 50-86, 107-35; Tinker, A New System,
61-287; Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 33-42.
10. See, for example: Denise Helly, "Introduction," The Cuba Commission Report:
A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba: The Original English-Language Text of
1876 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 5-27; Evelyn
Hu-DeHart, "Chinese Coolie Labour in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labour
or Neo-slavery?" Slavery and Abolition 14.1 (April 1993): 67-83; Rebecca J. Scott,
 Outlawing "Coolies" I3I

Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor; 1860-1899 (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985),29-35,89-110.
11. Look Lai, Indentured Labor; Caribbean Sugar, 19, 37-49, 58-61, 70-75, 87-106;
Wally Look Lai, "Chinese Indentured Labor: Migrations to the British West Indies in
the Nineteenth Century," Amerasia Journal 15.2 (1989): 117-35.
12. "Slavery in Jamaica, w.I.," Littell's Living Age, May 30,1846,429; "Miscellany: West-
India Immigration," Ibid., September 19, 1846,582; The Liberator, April 23, 1847.
13. "The Celestials at Home and Abroad," Littell's Living Age, August 14, 1852,289-91,
297-98; New York Times, April 15, May 3,15, June 14, December 10, 1852.
14. Jules Davids, ed., American Diplomatic and Public Papers: The United States and
China, ser. 1, vol. 17, The Treaty System and the Taiping Rebellion, 1842-1860: The
Coolie Trade and Chinese Emigration (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1973),
B13-B15; M. Foster Farley, "The Chinese Coolie Trade, 1845-1875," Journal of
Asian and African Studies 3.3-4 (July and October 1968): 262; Humphrey Marshall
to Secretary of State, March 8, 1853, 33rd Congress, 1st session, House Executive
Document (HED) 123,78-82.
15. John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of
American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999),3-59.
16. Robert]. Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams: Maritime Relations between China
and the United States, 1850-1915 (Tucson, AZ: Westernlore Press, 1988), 30-37;
Irick, Ch'ing Policy, 32-34; Peter Parker to Secretary of State Daniel Webster,
May 21, June 19, 1852, 34th Congress, 1st session, HED 105,94-96,108-10.
17. Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams, 29-30; Ching-Hwang Yen, Coolies and
Mandarins: China's Protection of Overseas Chinese during the Late Ch'ing Period
(1851-1911) (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1985),41-52.
18. Peter Parker to Commodore U. H.] Aulick, June 5,1852;]. H. Aulick to [Peter] Parker,
June 19, 1852; Peter Parker to Chinese Commissioners, June 22,1852; Peter Parker to
[Secretary of State Daniel] Webster, July 20, 1852; [Chinese Commissioners'
Reports], July 9, August 1, 1852; Peter Parker to Seu and Pih, Commissioners, &c.,
July 12, August 10, 1852; 34th Congress, 1st session, HED 105, 121-22, 127-28,
130-36, 144, 148-49.
19. T. Hart Hyatt to William L. Marcy, June 1, 1856 (including log excerpts), in Davids,
American Diplomatic and Public Papers, ser. 1, vol. 17,356-60; H. N. Palmer to
Thomas R. Rootes, February 15, 1856 (including log excerpts), 34th Congress,
1st session, Senate Executive Document (SED) 99, 8-10; H. N. Palmer to Secretary
of State W. L. Marcy, November 9, December 6, 1855, 34th Congress, 1st session,
HED 105,71-73.
20. Peter Parker to Messrs. Sampson & Tappan, September 8, 1856; Public Notification,
January 10, 1856; 35th Congress, 2nd session, SED 22, 1129-30, 625-26; Irick,
Ch'ing Policy, 53; The Liberator, April 18, 25, May 9, 16, 1856; New York Times,
April 21, 1856.
21. William B. Reed to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, January 13, 1858, 36th Congress,
1st session, SED 30, 59-65. The 1818 law is quoted in Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in
the Post-Civil War South: A People without a History (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State University Press, 1984), 37-38.
22. Public Notification, January 10, 1856, 35th Congress, 2nd session, SED 22,
625-26; William B. Reed to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, January 13, 1858;
William B. Reed to E. Doty, February 15, 1858; 36th Congress, 1st session, SED 30,
59-65,203-4.
23. Harper's Weekly, April 24, 1858; Lewis Cass to J. S. Black, April 28, 1858;
Domestic Letters of the Department of State (National Archives Microfilm M40,
I 32 Moon-Ho Jung

roll 46); J. S. Black to Lewis Cass, March 11, 1859; Miscellaneous Letters of the
Department of State (National Archives Microfilm M179, roll 168); General
Records of the Department of State, Record Group (RG) 59; National Archives
(NA), Washington, DC; William B. Reed to Lewis Cass, September 1, 1858, 36th
Congress, 1st session, SED 30,422-25.
24. Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams, 47-55, 60-61, 195; Irick, Ch'ing Policy,
57-60,67-104,148-49; Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 84-100.
25. Governor General Lau to John E. Ward, January 30, February 5,18,1860; minutes
of an interview between Governor General Lau and U.S. officials, February 1, 1860;
John E. Ward to Governor General Lau, February 3, 24, 1860; S. Wells Williams,
secretary of the U.S. legation, to John E. Ward, February 7, 20,1860; John E. Ward
to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, February 24, 1860; 36th Congress, 1st session,
HED 88,29-37,40-46,48.
26. "Slaves and Slavery," The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 19
(October 1846): 243-55; "Gov. Hammond's Letters on Slavery-No.3," De Bow's
Review 8 (February 1850): 128-31; Josiah Priest, Bible Defence of Slavery;
and Origin, Fortunes, and History of the Negro Race, 5th ed. (Glasgow, KY: Rev.
W. S. Brown, 1852),359-60.
27. "The West India Islands," De Bow's Review 5 (May and June 1848): 455-500
(quote from 488); "The Coolie Trade," De Bow's Review 23 (July 1857): 30-35.
28. "Asiatic Free Colonists in Cuba," De Bow's Review 24 (May 1858): 470-71; "The
Coolie Trade; or, The Encomienda System of the Nineteenth Century," De Bow's
Review 27 (September 1859): 296-321.
29. D[aniel] Lee: "Agricultural Apprentices and Laborers," Southern Cultivator 12.6
(June 1854): 169-70; "The Future of Cotton Culture in the Southern States, No. II,"
Southern Cultivator 16.3 (March 1858): 90-92; "The Future of Cotton Culture in
the Southern States," Southern Cultivator 16.5 (May 1858): 137-39; and "Laborers
for the South," Southern Cultivator 16.8 (August 1858): 233-36; [G.] Fitzhugh,
"The Conservative Principle; or, Social Evils and Their Remedies: Part II-Slave
Trade," De Bow's Review 22 (May 1857): 449-50, 457.
30. Thomas L. Clingman, "Coolies-Cuba and Emancipation," De Bow's Review 22
(April 1857): 414-19; "Monthly Record of Current Events," Harper's New Monthly
Magazine 18 (March 1859): 543-44; "Continental Policy of the United States-
The Acquisition of Cuba," The United States' Democratic Review 43 (April 1859):
29-30. On the antebellum movement for the annexation of Cuba, see Philip S. Foner,
A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the United States, vol. 2,1845-1895: From
the Era of Annexationism to the Outbreak of the Second War for Independence
(New York: International Publishers, 1963), 9-124.
31. J. Smith Homans and J. Smith Homans Jr., A Cyclopedia of Commerce and
Commercial Navigation, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), 1726-29.
32. 36th Congress, 1st session, House Report 443,1-5,24.
33. New York Times, April 21, 1860; John S. C. Abbott, South and North, or,
Impressions Received during a Trip to Cuba and the South (1860; New York: Negro
Universities Press, 1969),47-52, 184, 352. A Creole newspaper in British Guiana,
on the other hand, described indentured migration as "the enemy, instead of the
auxiliary, of freedom" (Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 180).
34. Foner, A History of Cuba, vol. 2, 121-22; L. E. Chittenden, A Report of the Debates
and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention, for Proposing
Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, Held at Washington, DC, in
February, AD 1861 (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1864),268,379.
 Outlawing "Coolies" I 33

35. 36th Congress, 2nd session, Journal of the Senate, 373-87 (esp. 382, 386);
"Monthly Record of Current Events," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 22 (April
1861): 689-90; Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America,
1861-1865, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 868.
36. 36th Congress, 1st session, HED 88, 1; 37th Congress, 2nd session, HED 16, esp. 1,
3-16, 21-36; Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd session, 350-52. Burnett
might have been referring to the Chinese laborers who worked in Kentucky in the
1850s, mostly at iron-refining factories (Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War
South,16-19).
37. Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 2nd session, 555-56, 581-82, 593, 838, 849,
855,911; Harper's Weekly, February 15, March 1, 1862.
38. The full text of the 1862 law can be found in Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War
South,177-79.
39. Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Tour of the Southern States, 1865-1866,
ed. C. Vann Woodward (1866; New York: Harper & Row, 1965),417; Thos. Savage
to William H. Seward, July 12, 1867, Dispatches from U.S. Consuls in Havana,
Cuba (NA Microfilm M899, roll 49), RG 59, NA; Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil
War South, 58-61.
40. C. N. Goulding to Hamilton Fish, November 19, 1869, February 9, 1870,
Dispatches from U.S. Consuls in Hong Kong (NA Microfilm M108, rolls 6 and 7),
RG59, NA.
41. Congressional Globe, 41st Congress, 2nd session, 5121-25, 5148-77 (quote from
5151). These postbellum developments are discussed in greater detail in my Coolies
and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
42. For the full text and a discussion of the law named after Representative Horace F.
Page of California, see George Anthony Peffer, If They Don't Bring Their Women
Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1999), 32-37, 115-17. On how the antislavery ideology shaped
the debates surrounding the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, see Michael Salman,
The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the
American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
 Chapter 6

"The Dread Void of Uncertainty":

Naming the Dead in the American Civil War

Drew Gilpin Faust

From Southern Cultures

We take for granted the obligation of our government to account for the
war dead. We expect the military to do everything possible to gather infor-
mation about our war casualties, to notify their families promptly and
respectfully, and to provide the bereaved with the opportunity to reclaim
and bury their kin. Eighteen months after the inauguration of combat in
Iraq, the Pentagon takes satisfaction that even though more than twelve
hundred American soldiers have died, none is missing or unidentified. The
contrasting failure to find every American who fought in Vietnam-an
estimated 1,950 remain unaccounted for-continues not just as a burden
for their grieving families, but as a political force in a POW/MIA movement
now more than three decades old.
The United States accepts its persisting obligation to these casualties of
war, and the Department of Defense spends more than $100 million a year
to identify and recover the approximately eighty-eight thousand soldiers
still missing from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. Yet the
assumption that government bears such a responsibility is in fact quite
recent. Only with the Korean War did the United States establish a policy of
identifying and bringing home the remains of every dead soldier. Only with
World War I did soldiers begin to wear official badges of identity-what
came to be known as dog tags. Only with the Civil War did the United States
establish a system of national cemeteries and officially acknowledge a
responsibility to name and honor the military dead. 1
There have been many revolutions in warfare in the past two centuries,
and the emerging recognition of an obligation to dead and missing soldiers
and their families is one of the least visible. Yet changing attitudes and
I 36 Drew Gilpin Faust

policies concerning the dead and missing may have had a more significant
impact than any other transformation, affecting homefront as well as bat-
tlefront, civilians as well as soldiers. And it was with the Civil War that this
shift in both private and public belief and behavior first became evident, as
Americans north and south struggled to find, name, and commemorate
everyone of the slain. This was a war that fundamentally redefined the
relationship of the citizen and the state in its abolition of chattel slavery, but
this highly visible affirmation of the individual's right to identity and per-
sonhood reflected beliefs about human worth that bore other implications
as well. In the face of the Civil War's rising death toll, these assumptions
began to yield new attitudes toward the dead and new obligations toward
bereaved families (figure 6.1). Bloodier than any other conflict in American
history, the Civil War presaged the butchery of World War I's western front
and the global carnage of the twentieth century. Approximately 620,000
American soldiers died between 1861 and 1865. A similar rate of death-
about 2 percent of the population-would today mean almost 6 million
casualties. More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American
wars combined up to Vietnam. Death touched nearly every American, north
and south, of the Civil War era, yet the unanticipated scale of the destruc-
tion meant that at least half these dead remained unidentified.
The Civil War is often designated the first modern and the last old-
fashioned war, and it is perhaps unsurprising to see its treatment of the dead
and missing and their families as both alien and familiar. In reporting
casualties, notifying kin, and handling corpses, the Civil War yielded poli-
cies of inhumane negligence that today seem both appalling and almost
unimaginable. Yet at the same time, soldiers and civilians alike often spoke
and acted in ways that make the years that separate us from our Civil War
predecessors appear not to have altered the fundamental human need for
consolation and mourning.
Central to the changes that have occurred since the 1860s is the grow-
ing acknowledgment of the importance of information-of knowing
whether a soldier is dead or alive, of being able to furnish news or provide
the bereaved with the consoling certainty of a loved one's body. Yet at the
outset of the Civil War, neither Union nor Confederacy recognized the
responsibility to supply such intelligence. There had been no official atten-
tion to the Mexican War dead until two years after the conflict ended,
when in 1850 the federal government found and reinterred 750 soldiers in
an American cemetery in Mexico City. This represented only about 5 percent
of those killed in the conflict, and not one body was identified. With the
outbreak of the Civil War, both Union and Confederate governments
established measures for maintaining records of deceased soldiers, requiring
forms to be filled out at army hospitals and to be forwarded in multiple
copies to Washington or Richmond. Significantly, however, not one of
these copies, or any other sort of official communication, was designated
for the family of the slain. And the obstacles even to this plan seemed
daunting. Samuel Preston Moore, surgeon general of the Confederate
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War I 37

Figure 6.1 On the battlefield of Antietam. The Civil War left some 620,000 American soldiers
dead-more than the total number killed in all other American wars from the Revolution to
Vietnam. But whose responsibility would it be to track soldiers' deaths, inform their families,
and record their names?
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

army, felt compelled in 1862 to issue a circular deploring the "indifference"

of his medical officers to record- keeping, but his exhortations apparently
had little effect. A January 1864 article in the Charleston Mercury that
summarized the preceding year's casualties concluded, "These returns
show a great deal of negligence by Captains and Surgeons in reporting the
deaths of soldiers.,,2
I 38 Drew Gilpin Faust

After more than a year of war, the u.s. government established more
elaborate procedures for enumerating the dead, but General Orders #33
was filled with language that acknowledged the obstacles to any real
improvement in their identification or treatment. Urging commanders to
keep records "when practicable" and "as far as possible," the measure
reflected official awareness of the enormous logistical and bureaucratic
challenges posed by armies and casualty rates of unprecedented scale.
Moreover, the order made no special provision for implementing its goals
and designated no special troops for graves registration duties. Instead, burial
units would simply be detailed from forces available at the end of any battle.
And, like earlier measures, General Orders #33 assumed no responsibility
for reporting deaths to those who waited at home. 3
Journalists at the front struggled to fill the void of official intelligence by
gathering information about casualties. In the days after major engage-
ments, Union and Confederate newspapers covered their pages with the
eagerly awaited reports. Sarah Palmer of South Carolina reflected the agonies
of northerners and southerners alike when she wrote after Second
Manassas, "I do feel too anxious to see the papers and get the list of casualties
from Co. K and yet I dread to see it." Although civilians crowded news
offices and railroad junctions waiting for information, the lists were
notoriously inaccurate and incomplete. 4
The sources of information varied considerably. Sometimes the list of a
regiment's dead and wounded was preceded by a statement from a chaplain
indicating that he had collected the information; sometimes an officer
introduced the list. In some instances, civilians representing charitable
organizations assembled the data, recognizing that military officials were
too occupied with the concerns of the living to make this a priority.
W. P. Price, who represented a South Carolina relief agency, tried to formalize
the system, writing from Atlanta in June 1864 that he had made arrange-
ments for colonels of Carolina regiments to furnish him with regular reports,
"by which means I hope to be enabled to furnish correct lists." But, he con-
tinued, his plan seemed imperiled, "for I regret to state that several important
letters sent from the field ... [with information] have miscarried."s
Lists frequently included statements acknowledging the inadequacy of
their information. As a Confederate newspaper reported in 1863, "Of
Company I, 38 men were lost in action. 31 of these are accounted for as
prisoners. The remaining seven must have been killed." Sons or brothers
listed as "slightly wounded" often turned out to be dead, and husbands
reported as "killed in action" later appeared unharmed. "I have known so
many instances where families have been held in agonized suspense for days
by the report of relatives being dangerously wounded when they were not,"
one Confederate wrote from Virginia to an anxious mother in South
Carolina. Joseph Willett of New York hastened to write to his sister after the
Battle of the Wilderness to explain, "You may have heard before this
reaches you that I was killed or wounded but allow me to contradict the
Report." Yankee Private Henry Struble was not only listed as a casualty
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War I 39

after the Battle of Antietam but assigned a grave after his canteen was found
in the hands of a man who died after Struble stopped to aid him. After the
war ended Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate the grave
that bore his name and to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered. 6
More reliable and certainly more consoling were the personal letters
custom required that a dead soldier's closest friends and immediate military
superiors write to his relatives. These letters emerged as a distinctive genre,
predictable in their descriptions of last moments, final words, and, when
possible, place and manner of burial. Yet months often passed before
soldiers in the field found time, circumstance, or strength to write. And
these communications were dependent on the vicissitudes of the postal
service that, at least in the Confederacy, grew increasingly unreliable.
Southerners complained that by 1864 so many of the postal clerks in
Richmond had been conscripted into the army that mail between the
Virginia theater and the homefront had entirely broken down.
Voluntary organizations worked to fill the void left by the failure of
military or government officials to provide information to families. In the
North, both the Christian and Sanitary Commissions, the two most significant
Unionwide charitable efforts to grow out of the war, regarded communication
with families as a central component of their undertaking. The Christian
Commission even proclaimed its commitment in words printed at the top of
each page of its stationery: "The U.S. Christian Commission send this sheet
as a messenger between the soldier and his home. Let it hasten to those who
wait for tidings." Late in 1862, the Sanitary Commission took bolder meas-
ures, establishing a "Hospital Directory" in order to centralize information
on the name and condition of every soldier admitted to a Union military
hospital. On the third floor of the Commission's central office in downtown
Washington, DC, three full-time clerks passed their days copying data from
the daily reports of dozens of hospitals into large ledgers?
During the directory's first year, some thirteen thousand specific inquiries
were submitted and nine thousand answered. By early 1865, more than a
million names had been recorded in the office ledgers. Inquiries about sol-
diers, the Sanitary Commission's Bulletin reported, "were often painful to
hear from the harrowing anxiety and persistency with which they are
presented." Although the replies were sometimes comforting, they often
proved devastating. The superintendent of the Washington office described
the daily scene of applicants arriving in person for news: "A mother has not
heard anything of her son since the last battle; she hopes he is safe, but
would like to be assured-there is no escape-she must be told that he has
fallen upon the 'federal altar'; an agony of tears bursts forth which seem as
if it would never cease .... A father ... with pale face and tremulous voice,
anxious to know, yet dreading to hear, is told that his boy is in the hospital
a short distance off; ... while tears run down his cheeks, and without uttering
another word [he] leaves the room."g
The Confederacy, lagging behind the North in men and material, also
faced greater shortages of information. The South had not experienced the
140 Drew Gilpin Faust

same explosion of voluntary associations that had characterized the North

in the prewar years and never developed centralized wartime charitable
organizations like the Sanitary or Christian Commissions. But Confederates
also sought means to systematize the collection of information about casu-
alties and ways to make that intelligence available to kin. The Louisiana
Soldiers Relief Association, for example, promised to provide information
to "friends at home" about any Louisiana recruit serving in Virginia, and
the Central Association and the South Carolina Relief Depot endeavored to
gather information for South Carolinians. Southern religious newspapers
often printed "Soldiers' Guides" listing news and location of the killed and
wounded. 9
Less philanthropically inclined individuals also sought to meet the demand
for information. In northern cities, entrepreneurs established themselves as
agents who would seek missing soldiers for a fee. An enterprise on Bleeker
Street in New York City, for example, called itself the "u.s. Army Agency"
and advertised in Harper's Weekly in 1864 for "Legal heirs seeking informa-
tion as to whereabouts of Soldiers killed or wounded in battle." In return for
their efforts in locating men, they would claim a share of the deceased's back
payor the widow's pension-thus the appeal to "legal heirs."lo
Even when information was accurate and available, through newspaper
casualty lists or the offices of a charitable organization or paid agent, it was
often not delivered until long after the fatal event. Weeks or months of wait-
ing were common. In South Carolina, for example, the first casualty lists
from the Battle of the Wilderness appeared in newspapers ten days after the
engagement they reported. In many cases families wrote desperate letters
hoping to discover news of kin from whom they had heard nothing for
months or even years. No wonder a Confederate officer took advantage of
rank and privilege-and the fortuitous residence of his family near a
telegraph line-to send a telegram home after every engagement simply
reporting, "I am well."ll
His decision to take the matter of providing information into his own
hands was typical of many Civil War participants, who devised a variety of
means to ensure that their fates would be reported to their loved ones.
Although no official identification badges were issued by either army,
soldiers, aided in some cases by enterprising civilians, devised their own pre-
cursors to the dog tag (figure 6.2). A Union burial party, working late on the
night of July 4, 1863, to inter the Gettysburg dead, came across the body of
a boy of about nineteen. In his pocket they found "a small silver shield with
his name, company and regiment upon it." They copied the information on
a wooden headboard for his grave and forwarded the shield to his father.
Soldiers in the Union army could purchase these badges from sutlers in the
field or from a variety of establishments on the homefront that regularly
advertised in the press. The badges seem to have been far less readily avail-
able in the South, but Confederate soldiers invented their own substitutes.
A pocket Bible inscribed with name and address and even instructions about
notification of kin served quite effectively.12
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War 141

Figure 6.2 Clara Barton expressed an astute understanding of the new responsibilities of gov-
ernment to dead soldiers and their families, writing to the Secretary of War, "The true patriot
willingly loses his life for his country-these poor men have lost not only their lives, but the
very record of their death. Common humanity would plead that an effort be made to restore
their identity." It was not until World War I did American soldiers wear official dog tags
bearing their personal information.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress

Stories are legendary of soldiers scribbling their names on bits of paper

and pinning them to their uniforms before engagements they expected to be
especially bloody-such as Meade's planned attack on Lee's field fortifica-
tions at Mine Run in 1863 or Grant's suicidal assault the next year at Cold
Harbor. The soldiers' terror that their very identities would be obliterated
expressed itself with a grim and almost dispassionate practicality; they con-
fronted the enormity of death with an ingenious attempt to control at least
one of its particulars. If a soldier could not save his life, he hoped at least to
preserve his name.
Soldiers had many allies among the civilian population in the effort to
maintain their identities and to provide for notification of kin. Katherine
Wormeley, serving as a nurse in a Union military hospital, used the same
method as the fatalistic soldiers. "So many nameless men come down to us,
speechless and dying," she reported, "that now we write the names and reg-
iments of the bad cases and fasten them to their clothing, so that if they are
speechless when they reach other hands, they may not die like dogs." To die
without an identity seemed to Wormeley the equivalent of surrendering
one's humanity, of becoming no more than an animal. Nursing pioneer
Clara Barton kept a series of small-one imagines pocket-notebooks into
which she entered information about the families of dying soldiers so that
142 Drew Gilpin Faust

Figure 6.3 Clara Barton during the Civil War. Barton recorded details about the families of
dying soldiers in her notebooks, so that she would be able to write them when the soldiers died.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

when time permitted she could write to their survivors (figure 6.3) The diary
of T. J. Weatherly, a South Carolina physician who attended Confederate
troops in Virginia, served a similar purpose. "Columbus Stephenson,
Bethany Church, Iredell County, NoCa," he noted on a torn and undated
page, "to be written to about the death &c of Lt. Thomas W. Stephens [on]."
It is not hard to envision Dr. Weatherly asking Thomas Stephenson for his
father's name and address as he consoled him in his last moments. "AA
Hewlett, Summerville Ala for Capt Hewlett; Mrs S Watkins Wadesboro NC
for S J Watkins 14th NC," Weatherly's list continued.13
Individuals did not just wait for letters or published casualty lists that
would provide them with information about the dead and wounded; they
also made use of the press to disseminate the knowledge they had been able
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War 143

to acquire. In both the North and South, civilians took out personal ads to
announce the condition of prisoners and the fate of the missing. What is
most striking about these advertisements is the way they were used to com-
municate across the divide of the Civil War-to provide southerners with
news from the North and vice versa. In 1864, for example, a Richmond
paper published a notice placed by Union General Benjamin Butler.
Directed to the attention of a Confederate naval surgeon, Butler's adver-
tisement assured his enemy that his son and a friend had been taken
prisoner at the end of June: "They are both well and at [the Union prisoner
of war camp at] Point Lookout. I have taken leave to write this note to
relieve your anxiety." He had spoken to the young prisoner, he explained,
in a "personal interview." Butler and the Confederate surgeon had almost
certainly been acquainted before the war, and ties of friendship and human-
itarianism combined in this instance to yield information about two of the
war's unknowns. A personal ad in a Richmond paper announced to "Hon.
RWB of South Carolina-your son Nat is a prisoner at Point Lookout,
unwounded, and in his usual health, and all his wants shall be supplied."
This anonymous northern friend of the family of Robert Barnwell was
offering not just the immediate solace of information, but a promise to
supplement the meager fare of Union prison camps for the duration of
Nat's incarceration. 14
Families bombarded officers, hospitals, and newspapers with requests for
information and traveled by the hundreds to battlefields in search of missing
kin. Observers described railroad junctions crowded with frantic civilians in
search of news of lost relatives. Oliver Wendell Holmes rushed to Maryland
in the aftermath of Antietam to search for his son. When in spite of his
worst fears, he found him alive, Holmes described his shifting expectations
as in some profound sense a shifting reality: "Our son and brother was dead
and is alive again, and was lost and is found." Many of those who sought
their loved ones did not share Holmes's happy outcome. Fanny Scott of
Virginia began her search for her son Benjamin after several months of
silence following the battle of Antietam. She wrote to Robert E. Lee early in
1863. He forwarded her letter across the lines to Union Gen. Joseph
Hooker, who promised to have the U.S. Surgeon General survey hospital
lists from Maryland (figure 6.4) Lee enclosed Hooker's letter in a reply to
Scott and expressed his hopes "that you may hear good news of your son."
But two months later Lee forwarded to her a letter sent to him through the
lines by a Flag of Truce, which reported, "Diligent and careful inquiry has
been made concerning the man referred to in the enclosure and no trace of
him can be discovered in any hospital or among the records of the rebel
prisoners." Within days, Fanny Scott had submitted a request to Lee for a
pass through Union lines to the North to search for her son. Evidently her
trip proved fruitless, for at the end of the war she was still seeking information.
General E. A. Hitchcock, placed by the Union army in charge of exchange
of prisoners, gently responded to Scott's July 15, 1865, request: "From the
length of time since the battle of Antietam and you not having heard from
your son during all this time, I am very sorry to say that the presumption is
 t

Figure 6.4 A mother's quest for knowledge of her son's fate prompted Confederate General Robert E. Lee (left) to correspond with Union General Joseph
Hooker (right) in an effort to find out what had happened to the young. Virginia soldier.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War 145

that he fell a victim to that battle. If he were still living I cannot understand
why he should not have found means of making the fact known to yoU."15
The Scott incident illustrates several significant aspects of the problem of
the missing in the Civil War. First, it demonstrates the possibility of an indi-
vidual being entirely lost-a circumstance many civilians found difficult to
fathom. The scale of the war presented unprecedented problems of record-
keeping; undoubtedly many of those never identified were bodies that could
not be connected with names or corpses that were buried too hastily for the
names to be procured. But there was another aspect of Civil War death that
contributed to the large numbers of unidentified-and would contribute
even more dramatically to the nameless ranks of World War I dead. The
Civil War obliterated not just names but entire bodies, often leaving nothing
left to identify or bury. A Union chaplain described in the aftermath of
Gettysburg "little fragments so as hardly to be recognizable as any part of a
man." Another soldier wrote in horror of comrades "literally blown to
atoms." Many Civil War soldiers actually disappeared, their bodies vapor-
ized by the firepower of this first modern war. This may have been the fate
of Benjamin Scott. 16
Fanny Scott's story demonstrates as well the unifying power of death
even amidst the divisive forces of war. General Lee is not above concerning
himself with the fall of an individual sparrow-though one assumes that
Benjamin Scott was not just an ordinary soldier, but one whose family had
some larger claims on Lee's compassion. But the intimacy of this
all-American war displays itself strikingly here, as Lee readily corresponds
with his Yankee counterpart, who himself acts promptly and decisively to
honor his enemy's request. Even as they contemplate the spring campaign
that will produce their bloody confrontation at Chancellorsville, Lee and
Hooker find themselves on the same side as Fanny Scott in her desperate
pursuit of information about her son. Killing enemy soldiers was the goal of
each general and of both armies, yet bereavement could unite them in com-
mon purpose.
Fanny Scott's 1865 request for information about a son who had by then
been gone almost three years suggests the depth and tenacity of the need to
secure accurate information about the fate of missing men. General
Hitchcock's 1865 letter to Scott seems to reflect a certain incredulity that
she had not yet resigned herself to a grim conclusion that he regarded as
both undeniable and unavoidable. Yet Fanny Scott's story demonstrates not
just the nationally unifying power of death, but also the intensity and the
persistence of its hold upon the bereaved. Nine years after the end of the
war, Mrs. R. L. Leach was still seeking information about what had
happened to her son after he was sent to a hospital ship in Virginia. Unable
to admit he must be dead, she explained, "We think some times that he is in
Some Insane Hospital." Without further information, she lived in "sus-
pense," even as she acknowledged that "to know he was dead would be
better." Jane Mitchell had received a letter after the Battle of Gettysburg
from a soldier who described burying a corpse he found rolled in a blanket
146 Drew Gilpin Faust

with her son's name pinned to it, but she never saw the body or found the
grave and was never convinced it was really her son. "I would like to find
that grave," she wrote. "It was years before 1 gave up the hope that he
would some day appear. 1 got it into my head that he had been taken pris-
oner and carried off a long distance but that he would make his way back
one day-this 1 knew was very silly of me but the hope was there neverthe-
less." The reality of loss was often, as one bereaved South Carolina woman
put it, "too hard to realize."I?
The power and persistence of hope manifested itself dramatically in the
responses Union Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs received when
he decided in 1868 to publish in northern magazines a drawing of a soldier
who had died unidentified in a Washington military hospital in 1864. This
soldier would have been long forgotten if he had not had in his possession
the considerable sum of $360. A published announcement seeking his iden-
tity also noted that the dead man had left an ambrotype of a child. Letters
from women streamed into Meigs's office. While some may indeed have
been fortune hunters seeking to claim the money, the great majority display
what seems like such poignant desperation that it is difficult to doubt the
sincerity of the wrenching tales they tell. Jenny McConkey of Illinois seemed
to know she was grasping at straws when she wrote in hopes the unidentified
man might be her son, whom she had last heard from in 1862. The
photograph of the little boy was hard to explain, for her son was childless,
but, she rationalized, he might carry the portrait in any case" as he was very
fond of children." A Pennsylvania woman whose husband had last been
heard of in the infamous Confederate prison camp at Andersonville
described her life as "one constant daze of anxiety" because of her inability
to get any information about his fate. Martha Dort wrote explaining that
her husband had reportedly been shot while being transferred from one
prison to another in 1863, "But that may not be true. Mistakes do often
occur." The report of the child's photograph encouraged her to hope, for her
husband had carried an ambrotype of their son, aged three or four, wearing
plaid pants, with his hands in his pockets. She enclosed fifty cents for a copy of
the photograph. Meigs's office returned the money, for the picture did not
match her description. 18
The mysterious soldier was never identified; the child in the ambrotype
never provided with the details of his father's death or with his $360
inheritance. But the unknown man had proved the catalyst for an out-
pouring of despair and hope for women who represented the many thou-
sands of loved ones left not just without husbands, brothers, or sons, but
bereft of the kind of information that might enable them truly to mourn.
A professor at Gettysburg College who aided many civilians searching for
kin after that battle described "aching hearts in which the dread void of
uncertainty still remained unsatisfied by positive knowledge." As the war
approached its conclusion, the search for "positive knowledge" would
intensify in ways that began profoundly to affect both public policy and
private behavior.19
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War 147

As early as the summer of 1862, the pressing need for space to bury
soldiers dying in hospitals concentrated in and around Washington, DC led
Congress to authorize President Lincoln to establish national cemeteries "for
the soldiers who shall die in the service of their country." Motivated chiefly
by the urgent necessity to dispose of corpses, rather than by any commitment
to improvement in identification of deceased soldiers and notification of kin,
this measure nevertheless encouraged more accurate record-keeping and
marked an acknowledgment by the federal government of responsibility for
the war dead. Without any formal policy to implement this Congressional
action, the War Department organized cemeteries as emergency circum-
stances demanded-mainly near concentrations of military hospitals where
large numbers of bodies required burial. Under the provisions of this meas-
ure, however, five cemeteries of a rather different character were created in
the course of the war. These were burial grounds for the dead of a particular
battle, usually established when a lull in active operations and the availabil-
ity of troops for burial duty made such an undertaking possible. In each case,
the purpose of the effort extended well beyond simply meeting the need for
disposing of the dead. An explicit goal of memorialization lay at the heart of
these efforts and made identification of the fallen heroes a central part of the
undertaking. Gettysburg represented a particularly important turning point
in this transition in official policy toward the war's casualties. The large
number of deaths in this bloody battle was obviously an important factor in
generating action, but it is not insignificant that this carnage occurred in the
North, in a town that had not had the opportunity to grow accustomed to
the horrors of constant warfare that had battered Virginia for two long
years. Perhaps even more critical was the fact that the North had the
resources to respond, resources not available to the hard-pressed
Confederacy. Because the attempt to inter the Union dead occurred so soon
after that battle, the level of success in identifying the bodies was extremely
high; 82 percent were named. Lincoln's presence at the dedication of the
cemetery in November 1863, not to mention his delivery of an address that,
historian Garry Wills has argued, "remade America," and also signaled the
new significance of the dead in public life and ceremony.20
Perhaps the very configuration of the cemetery itself can explain the force
behind this transformation. The national cemetery at Gettysburg was
arranged so that every grave was of equal importance; every dead soldier
mattered equally, regardless of rank or station. Changing American
attitudes toward the Civil War dead reflected this new conception of
citizenship, of the importance of the individual and his place in the
American democracy. The citizen had a claim on the state; the state had
obligations to the individual. And fundamental to this obligation was the
acknowledgment of the citizen as a unique and singular person-a person
with a name-in death as in life. It is from this changed understanding of the
relationship of the citizen and the state that the government's gradual
assumption of responsibility for identifying war dead and notifying kin
would emerge in the course of the next century.21
148 Drew Gilpin Faust

The establishment of the National Cemetery system was not the only
wartime measure that marked these shifting perceptions. In July 1864,
Congress, demonstrating its sense of the inadequacies of military procedures
concerning the war dead, passed an act that established a new organiza-
tional principle for handling of the war dead, designating a special Graves
Registration unit rather than assuming that soldiers could simply be detailed
from the line to carry out these duties, as had heretofore been the case.
When Confederate General Jubal Early attacked Fort Stevens near
Washington, DC, in late 1864, this new unit, under Assistant Quartermaster
James Moore, succeeded in identifying every Union body and recording
every grave. But during the final operations of the war, men were not spared
to serve in registration units, and the principle was abandoned. It represented,
nevertheless, a new departure as well as a precursor of organizational
methods that would become standard in twentieth-century wars.
The innovations in record-keeping that occurred during the Civil War
originated in the North and applied to the treatment of Union dead. This
was a result of levels of bureaucratic development and available resources,
not of any fundamental difference between northern and southern attitudes
about the dead. After Appomattox, these distinctions would become even
sharper. Free from the demands of waging war, the North could devote itself
more fully to the memorialization of the slain and the needs of the bereaved.
The South, however, in losing its nationhood, also lost the official govern-
ment structures that might have organized efforts to reclaim bodies and
notify kin. In addition, the desperate poverty of the defeated South left it
with inadequate resources to support many of the living, and thus little to
expend upon the dead. Yet white southerners and white southern women in
particular endeavored through private and informal means to accomplish
many of the same goals pursued by well-funded government efforts in the
North. A group of Confederate women in South Carolina, for example,
organized to bring their dead home from Antietam; a Memorial Association
founded by Richmond ladies in 1866 expended its efforts and all the funds
it could raise to identify and bring Confederates back from Gettysburg. And
northerners who judged official measures insufficient continued their own
private efforts to secure information for the thousands of Americans still
searching for news of their kin.
Perhaps the most active of such individuals was Clara Barton, whose
wartime endeavors had included forwarding information to the families of
the men she treated at the front. Prompted after the end of hostilities by the
number of letters she continued to receive from women in search of lost
husbands and sons, Barton was determined to develop a more systematic
approach to dealing with what she described as the "intense
anxiety ... amounting in many instances almost to insanity" of these peti-
tioners. In the spring of 1865, she founded an organization she named the
Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United
States Army, and she devised a plan to serve as a clearinghouse, publishing
the names submitted to her by those in search of kin and requesting
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War 149

information about their fate. "I appeal to you to give such facts relative to
the fate of these men as you may recollect or can ascertain," she explained
at the top of one published list. "They have been your comrades on march,
picket or raid, or in battle, hospital, or prison; and, falling there, the fact
and manner of their death may be known only to you." Within days of her
announcement, Barton had received several hundred letters, and they soon
poured in by the thousands. By mid-June 1865, she had published the names
of twenty thousand men; by the time she closed the office in 1868 she
reported that it had received and answered 63,182 letters and identified
twenty-two thousand missing soldiers.22
In the summer of 1865, Clara Barton became engaged in another
venture, one that would evolve into a major federal commitment to the
identification of missing men. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had learned
that a surviving list of soldiers buried at Andersonville corresponded with
numbered graves, offering the possibility of identifying and memorializing a
great many who had endured the prison camp's extreme suffering and
deprivation. Stanton authorized an expedition to be headed by James
Moore, the quartermaster who had so successfully employed the new graves
registration procedures in 1864 and who was now in charge of battlefield
cemeteries. Clara Barton, invited by Stanton almost as an afterthought,
joined the endeavor. Though she and Moore grew quickly to resent and even
detest one another, their efforts resulted in the identification of 12,912 of
the 13,363 recovered bodies. All were reinterred in marked graves, and on
August 17 their resting place was dedicated as the Andersonville National
Cemetery (figure 6.5).
What Barton had been trying to accomplish through voluntarism and phi-
lanthropy, Moore embraced as the responsibility of the state. His duties as
quartermaster general in the course of the next five years would be to attempt
to identify every slain Union soldier in the eastern theatre and bury them all
with the honor they had earned. Across the South, federal agents searched for
every Union corpse, buried or unburied. For all the difficulties locating and
identifying bodies interred across extended battlefields, the greatest challenge
would be finding soldiers scattered all about the countryside-along the line
of march, in villages where they had been carried after being wounded, in sites
where they had fallen after minor skirmishes too insignificant even to be
recorded. Agents reported frequent instances of Union graves desecrated by
angry southerners. "This grave," wrote one officer from Georgia "is entirely
obliterated as Mr Brown has plowed and raised corn over it during the last
season. There was a headboard plainly marked which this Brown has
knocked down or destroyed." In the aftermath of war, obliterating names and
remains could come to seem as important to the defeated as had the killing of
enemy soldiers during the war years themselves.
Perhaps the northern agents' most striking observation, however, was
their discovery of the role of black southerners in honoring and protecting
the Union dead. About two miles from Savannah, one agent reported, lay
77 graves in 4 neat rows, all but 3 identified, all marked with "good painted
 V1
o

Figure 6.5 On August 17, 1865, Clara Barton raises the National Flag at the dedication of the Andersonville (Georgia) National Cemetery. This sketch, by
I. C. Schotel, depicts the dedication of the cemetery grounds where fourteen thousand Union soldiers are interred who died in Andersonville Prison. Known as
Camp Sumter, Andersonville was one of the largest of many Confederate military prisons established during the Civil War. It is now the Andersonville National
Historic Site, maintained by the National Park Service.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War 15 I

headboards and in very good condition." This was the resting place of a unit
of U.S. Colored Troops, carefully buried and tended by the freed people of
the area. But it was not just black soldiers who received this respectful
treatment. Behind an African Colored Church near Bowling Green,
Kentucky, for example, 1,134 manicured graves held both black and white
Yankee soldiers. One agent noted that in the course of his travels through
the South, a black carpenter proved his most useful informant, for he had
made coffins and "helped to bury many of the Union dead himself." In the
postwar South, the struggle over the war's legacy of freedom included a
struggle over the bodies and names of the war's dead.23
By 1870, some three hundred thousand men had been reinterred in
seventy three national cemeteries, and 58 percent had been identified. This
elaborate and costly program undertaken by the federal government in
every theater of the war made a forceful statement about the democratiza-
tion of death and about the significance of the body as the repository of
identity and thus of the individual rights for which the nation had fought.
But the reinterment program spoke to issues that transcended individualism
as well. Gathering the slain into national cemeteries affirmed, to paraphrase
Lincoln, that both they and their deaths belonged to the Union, that they
had not died in vain, had-in dying that their nation might live-in some
sense not died at all. The Civil War transformed death-not just in material
ways by preserving bodies and identities in face of war's destructive
power-but in ideological ways as well.
The policies toward the dead that evolved in the course of the Civil War
represented the assumption of new responsibilities by the federal government-
responsibilities to dead soldier citizens, but responsibilities as well to
families and to the women so often left alone to head them as the result of
war's carnage. Clara Barton may ultimately have lost her personal struggle
with James Moore for resources and power, but her understanding of their
common goals would not be abandoned-would in fact be embodied in the
very program of massive reburial he implemented. After all, she too had
worked to compel the government to accept responsibility for the missing
and had in 1865 written to the secretary of war to seek federal support for
the search for missing men. "The true patriot," she declared,

willingly loses his life for his country-these poor men have lost not only their
lives, but the very record of their death. Common humanity would plead that
an effort be made to restore their identity.... As call after call for "three
hundred thousand more" fell upon the stricken homes, the wife released her
husband and the mother sent forth her son, and they were nobly given to their
country for its necessities: it might take and use them as the bonded officer
uses the property given into his hands; it might if needs be use up or lose them,
and they would submit without complaint, but never ... has wife or mother
agreed that for the destruction of her treasures no account should be rendered
her. I hold these men in the light of Government property unaccounted for. 24

Barton here explores complex notions of rights, of the mutual obligations

that bind state and citizens together. Significantly, at the end of a war about
152 Drew Gilpin Faust

slavery, she situates her discussion in concepts of property in persons. Yet

this is not the property of slavery; here the individual freely acts as his own
agent, as a true patriot "willingly" ceding control over his life. And here,
again in contrast to a system of human bondage that tore families asunder,
the wife and mother consent to give up their husband and son "to their
country for its necessities."
But this cession of rights, of property in person, remains incomplete. It is,
in effect, a contract in which the state must in return accept certain
obligations-to provide a record of death, an accounting for the destruction
of human treasure. And it is, tellingly, a contract that, in Barton's rendering,
is undertaken between women and the state. Women, legally denied the
right to make contracts in most of pre-Civil War America, here claim new
rights of personhood and citizenship that derive from their wartime sacrifice.
In the context of a war of unprecedented mortality, the compelling human-
itarian logic that produced emancipation combined with the imperatives of
devastating human loss to create a new conception of the relation of the
individual and the state. Clara Barton here articulates a notion of citizenship
founded in the nation's experience of Civil War and expressed through the
powerful shared public need to affirm the individual's right to identity and
humanity even in death. Naming the names underscored an emerging
awareness of the extent and the perquisites of citizenship as well as of the
fundamental obligations of the state; it affirmed the claims of the men who
had died as well as those of the wives and mothers left to mourn their loss.25
The distinguished European historian Thomas W. Laqueur has written
extensively about this issue of naming the dead in the context of twentieth-
century wars. He notes a shift in sensibility occurring with World War I. The
dead would no longer be "shoveled into the ground and so forgotten," as
Tennyson put it, but instead named and memorialized by the hundreds of
thousands on monuments and in graveyards across the western front. This
new attention to names, Laqueur concludes, represents a significant marker
of modernity; it is "the result of the modern notion that everyone has a
memorable life to live, or in any case the right to a life story." For the United
States, however, this would be a nineteenth rather than a twentieth-century
development. The war that freed the slaves established broad claims to
rights of citizenship and identity-for blacks as well as whites, for women
as well as men, for both the living and the dead. 26

Notes
Drew Gilpin Faust is Lincoln Professor of History and Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is a past president of the Southern Historical
Association and author of five books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the
Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which was a New York Times Notable
Book of 1996 and winner of the Francis Parkman Prize.
1. Caroline Alexander, "Letter from Vietnam: Across the River Styx: The Mission to
Retrieve the Dead," The New Yorker, October 25, 2004, 44-51.
 Naming the Dead in the American Civil War 153

2. Samuel P. Moore, August 14, 1862, in Wayside Hospital, Charleston, Order and
Letter Book, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia;
Charleston Mercury, January 27,1864.
3. Edward Steere, The Graves Registration Service in World War II, Quartermaster
Historical Studies #21, Historical Section, Office of the Quartermaster (U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1951),4.
4. Sarah J. Palmer to Harriet R. Palmer, September 5, 1862, Palmer Family Papers,
South Caroliniana Library.
5. Daily South Carolinian, June 16, 1864.
6. Daily South Carolinian, July 22,1863; F. S. Gillespie to Mrs. Carson, July 5,1864,
Carson Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library; Joseph Willett to Dear Sister,
June 24, 1864, Elizabeth Cummings Papers, New York Historical Society; Steven R.
Stotelmyer, The Bivouacs of the Dead (Baltimore, MD: Toomey Press, 1992), 17.
7. The Sanitary Reporter, January 15, 1864, 135; J. w. Hoover to Mr. Kuhlman,
September 8, 1864, J. W. Hoover Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
8. "The Hospital Directory," Sanitary Commission Bulletin I(December 15, 1863): 109.
9. Louisiana Soldiers' Relief Association and Hospital in the City of Richmond,
Virginia (Richmond: Enquirer Book and Job Press, 1862), 30.
10. Harper's Weekly, September 13, 1864, 576.
11. Daily South Carolinian, May 17,1864; W. D. Rutherford to Mrs. W. D. Rutherford
[telegram], July 6,1862, W. D. Rutherford Papers, South Caroliniana Library.
12. Gregory Coco, Killed in Action: Eyewitness Accounts of the Last Moments of 100
Union Soldiers Who Died at Gettysburg (Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications,
1992), 76; Harper's Weekly, August 1, 1863, September 3, 1864.
13. Katharine Prescott Wormeley, The Other Side of War: With the Army of the
Potomac. Letters from the Headquarters of the United States Sanitary Commission
During the Peninsular Campaign in Virginia in 1862 ( Boston: Ticknor and
Company, 1889), 145; Clara Barton, Journal 1863, Clara Barton Papers, Library of
Congress; T. J. Weatherly, Diary, 1864-1865, South Caroliniana Library.
14. Daily South Carolinian, July 21,1864. These were copied by the Carolinian "from
the Richmond papers."
15. Oliver Wendell Holmes, "My Hunt after 'The Captain,' " Atlantic 10 (December
1862): 743; Robert E. Lee to Joseph Hooker, February 14, 1863; Joseph Hooker to
Robert E. Lee, February 16, 1863; Robert E. Lee to Fanny Scott, February 18, 1863;
Charles S. Venable to Fanny Scott, April 1, 1863; William Alexander Hammond to
Robert E. Lee, March 23,1863; Thomas M. R. Talcott to Fanny Scott, April 18, 1863;
E. A. Hitchcock to Fanny Scott, July 25, 1865, all in Scott Family Papers, Virginia
Historical Society, Richmond. See Mrs. T. B. Hurlbut to Clara Barton, September 26,
1865, for a description of Confederate general James Longstreet's aid to a northern
woman searching for her son. Clara Barton Papers, Library of Congress.
16. Gregory Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land: Gettysburg, the Aftermath of a Battle
(Thomas Publications, 1995), 48; Robert G. Carter, Four Brothers in Blue (Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press, 1978), 324-25.
17. Mrs. R. L. Leach to Clara Barton, March 28, 1874, Clara Barton Papers, Library of
Congress; Gregory Coco, Wasted Valor: The Confederate Dead at Gettysburg
(Thomas Publications, 1990), 141; Sarah J. Palmer to Harriet R. Palmer, September
5, 1862. This is the wartime foundation for the postwar reconciliation David Blight
describes in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
18. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs to Surgeon General, September 19,
1868, Office of the Quartermaster General: Consolidated Correspondence File,
1794-1915, Portrait of Unknown Soldier, Box 1173, RG 92, National Archives;
154 Drew Gilpin Faust

Mrs. Jenny McConkey to Meigs, November 4, 1868; Ellen Harback to Meigs,

October 26, 1868; Mrs. J. P. Coppersmith to Meigs, November 30, 1868; James M.
Truitt to Meigs, November 6, 1868, all in ibid.
19. Coco, A Strange and Blighted Land, 306.
20. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1992).
21. On the revolutionary implications of treating all soldiers equally, see "Our National
Cemeteries," Harper's Monthly Magazine 33 (August 1866): 311. By contrast, in the
American Revolution, "the bodies of the officers and men of the army were interred
in ways that emphasized the gap between them," Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of
Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington's Army (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004),174.
22. Clara Barton to Secretary of War Stanton, draft letter October 1865, final version
November 27, 1865, Clara Barton Papers, Library of Congress; "To Returned
Soldiers and Others," ibid.
23. Journal of a Trip through Parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia for the Purpose
of Locating the Scattered Graves of Union Soldiers [1866] RG92 685, National
Archives, v. I, 177,211,240; v. II, 26. Emphasis in the original.
24. Clara Barton to Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, October 1865, Clara Barton
Papers, Library of Congress.
25. On contract in this period, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage
Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
26. Thomas W. Laqueur, "Names, Bodies, and the Anxiety of Erasure," The Social and
Political Body, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter (New York: Guilford
Press, 1996), 123, 135.
 Chapter 7

Diplomatic Wives:The Politics of Domesticity and

the "Social Game" in the U.S. Foreign Service,
1905-1941
Molly M. Wood

From The Journal ofWomen's History

In the first half of the twentieth century, u.s. Foreign Service officers
understood that marriage enhanced their diplomatic careers and generally
considered their wives to be partners in the Service. In 1914, U.S. consul
Francis Keene wrote to his wife Florence, "You and I, as a team, are, I am
confidant, unexcelled in the Service."l Career diplomat Earl Packer
explained that "the wives carry a terrific burden" in the Foreign Service,
while another longtime diplomat, Willard Beaulac, declared, "I know of no
field in which a wife can be more helpful."2 Meanwhile, an outside observer
of the u.S. Foreign Service in the 1930s explained that "the wife may serve
as a go-between for her husband" by taking part in social interactions with
other diplomats and representatives from the host country.3 At the same
time, many American Foreign Service wives also spoke explicitly about their
"careers" in the Foreign Service, and the u.S. State Department initiated
changes that reflected the Department's dependence on "the tradition of
husband and wife teams and of wives' participation in the representational
activities of a post."4 Specifically, the 1924 Rogers Act, which was intended
to reform and professionalize the Foreign Service, resulted in administrative
changes, such as allowances for rent and entertaining, that directly reflected
the growing reliance on the presence of American wives overseas.
Furthermore, the new Foreign Service Personnel Board, formed by the
Rogers Act to evaluate each Foreign Service officer's eligibility for promo-
tion, explicitly discussed wives' strengths and weaknesses when assessing
each officer's merits, noting in particular the success of officers who were
"ably seconded" or "ably assisted" by their wives. 5
156 Molly M.Wood

At the turn of the twentieth century, many government officials, includ-

ing President Theodore Roosevelt, concluded that most diplomats were
"amateurs" who were more interested in pursuing a "genteel and leisurely
life" of "elegance and sophistication" in some foreign capital than in repre-
senting growing American interests abroad. In 1905, Roosevelt signed an
Executive Order establishing, for the first time, an examination system for
lower level prospective diplomatic secretaries, but these reforms were hap-
hazard and only partially successful. 6 Almost twenty years later, State
Department officials still lamented, behind closed doors, the poor quality of
some of their candidates for overseas posts, including one in 1924 who was
"qualified by birth, antecedents and personality" but "greatly hampered by
stupidity."? Happily, most applicants were more competent, dedicated, and
service-oriented than the stereotype suggested, but the fear that inexperi-
enced and incompetent diplomats were jeopardizing efforts to establish
American power and influence around the world still worried officials. Calls
for reform and modernization finally resulted in the 1924 Rogers Act,
which reorganized the Foreign Service and initiated a comprehensive merit
promotion system, opening the Service to men of lesser financial means. The
reforms initiated by the Rogers Act continued to evolve along the same lines
until 1941, when American entry into World War II changed the Foreign
Service dramatically in size, purpose, and personnel. The period between
1905 and 1941 therefore provides a finite period of study during which the
Foreign Service self-consciously modernized itself in order to better serve the
United States's expanding role in the wider world. Through this period,
however, the Foreign Service remained relatively small and almost exclu-
sively male. In the wake of the 1920 suffrage victory, less than a dozen
women moved into professional positions in the Foreign Service before
World War II, yet hundreds of married women accompanied their Foreign
Service husbands to diplomatic and consular posts all over the world during
the same period.
This article challenges the assumption that because wives held no formal
positions in the Foreign Service they played no significant role in the
conduct of American diplomacy. In fact, a Foreign Service wife wielded con-
siderable authority and influence as wife, mother, homemaker, hostess, and
role model. By operating within conventional gender roles that emphasized
domesticity, Foreign Service wives resembled both the wives of British
officials in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who, as
historian Mary Procida has shown, served as "active agents in imperial
politics," and the American military wives of the post-World War II era
who, as historian Donna Alvah has explained, "actively contribute to [Cold
War American] military objectives and American foreign relations."g
A study of American Foreign Service wives in the first half of the twentieth
century suggests ways in which gender helped to create and maintain a
positive American presence all over the world, and helped to define the
conduct of American diplomacy. An examination of the role of gender in the
politics of diplomatic representation will contribute to the growing body of
 Diplomatic Wives 157

literature on gender and u.s. foreign relations. In the 1980s, a small number
of historians, determined to add women to the field of U.s. diplomatic his-
tory, produced works on individuals, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and
Jeannette Rankin, and groups of women, such as missionaries and peace
activists, who clearly influenced u.s. foreign policy.9 Worried that studies
such as these only emphasized the "outsider" status of women in foreign
policy, and influenced by ground breaking theoretical work on gender as an
essential category of historical analysis, scholars such as Cynthia Enloe,
Emily Rosenberg, Andrew Rotter, and Frank Costigliola, among others,
have found gender to be embedded in both the language and conduct of
twentieth century U.s. foreign relations. IO Others, including Margaret
Strobel, Ann Stoler, Antoinette Burton, and Laura Wexler, have written con-
vincingly about the ways in which gender has served to legitimize colonial
and imperial relationships between nations.u
In the Foreign Service, wives managed, without pay, the domestic duties
and social obligations that ensured the smooth operation of American mis-
sions. They also helped establish a powerful American presence in countries
all over the world. Their visibility overseas enhanced American prestige and
reflected the very best of the American way of life to other cultures. In order
to conduct foreign relations, especially in the pre-World War II years,
diplomats spent a great deal of time establishing and maintaining personal
relationships with local officials and dignitaries in order to gather informa-
tion, to report accurately on local conditions, and to represent American
positions to their hosts effectively.12 The political relationships they created
were therefore also, by definition, social relationships. As Beaulac has
explained, "the social contacts" initiated by diplomats "supplemented our
official conversations and helped us to interpret [those conversations]."13
The Foreign Service establishment understood that formal diplomatic nego-
tiations between officials were complemented by what one observer called
the "secret methods of diplomacy" and another Foreign Service officer
described as "the process of friendly informed negotiation."14 Many of
these relationships were cultivated outside of the office and at all hours of
the day and night, blurring the distinction between private life and public
work. Hilary Callen has already described the "diffuseness of the diplomat's
role" and noted "the lack of sharp definition of 'public' and 'private'
identities" that inevitably "spills over onto his wife.,,15 By organizing and
managing highly visible social functions, many of which took place in their
own homes, Foreign Service wives helped facilitate the exchange of infor-
mation and messages, official and unofficial, overt and subtle, that defined
the conduct of early twentieth-century diplomacy.16 The success of these
social occasions and the efficient conduct of diplomacy therefore depended
largely on wives' domestic and social skills, as well as their more intangible
function as representatives of the American way of life.
Because the duties and responsibilities of Foreign Service wives reinforced
conventional gender roles, scholars are only beginning to recognize the
inherently political nature of the work they performed. I? Maureen
158 Molly M.Wood

Flanagan has urged scholars to avoid choosing between interpreting

"women's activities as socially directed" or as explicitly political, just as
Alvah has observed that military wives' "domestic activities and political
participation were seen as intertwined." In the context of the early federal
period in Washington, D.C., Catherine Allgor has demonstrated that
women "appear as political actors in their own right" by "using social
events and the 'private sphere' to establish the national capital and build
the extraofficial structures so sorely needed in the infant federal republic." 18
American Foreign Service wives used the social arena to create and main-
tain political relationships, and to send and receive political messages in
American missions overseas. More subtly, their domestic presence, in
roles as wife, mother, hostess, and homemaker, helped to create an island
of American domesticity in a decidedly foreign setting. Diplomatic wives
therefore served the same purpose as the wives of colonial administra-
tors in British imperial settings; they were the women who, as Burton has
explained, "by virtue of their caretaking functions and their role as
transmitters of culture," helped to legitimize the imperial mission as a
civilizing mission. 19
Yet the State Department made little effort to explicitly define and codify
the roles they believed wives should play, and indeed made few efforts to
define the work of representation in the pre-World War II era beyond the
assumption that the American "style of diplomacy must be representative of
our way of life," and that American envoys overseas must work at "creating
understanding" and "correcting misunderstanding" about the United
States. Yet wives recognized their responsibility to "set an example"
abroad. 20 One Foreign Service wife in the mid-1930s showed great aware-
ness that she "became a public person or public property" when she married
a Foreign Service officer. "Whatever I did," she explained, "was always
regarded as not only personal or our own, but as an American also, or wife
of a diplomat, also. So how I or the other wives entertained, how we took
part in charities, or culture, art, literature, sport [or1fashion, was [all a 1part
of representation."21 Wives were also well aware by this time that State
Department officials were evaluating them on their ability to create and
maintain these kinds of political relationships both within and outside of the
embassy. As Lucy Briggs remembered, "In those days, when a man's record
was written up, his wife was also commented on. And if she added to his
social position in a pleasant way, or if she was helpful in other ways, that
was always put down. Or if she was something of a handicap that was put
down toO.,,22 Wives understood that everything they did reflected on their
husbands and their country. This work was particularly important as the
United States looked to expand its economic and political interests abroad
and sought to be perceived widely as a nonimperial power. In the absence of
formal colonial or military missions, U.S. Foreign Service wives served as
the only significant numbers of American women in quasi-official positions
living abroad. The State Department hoped that these wives would serve as
exemplars who would, through their domestic presence overseas, introduce
 Diplomatic Wives 159

the most cultivated Americans to the rest of the world and help project a
message of overall goodwill. 23
Yet Foreign Service wives are still largely ignored as serious subjects of
study. Some feminist scholars undoubtedly have been irritated by the way
Foreign Service wives universally identified themselves as the "wife of" an
American diplomat, or by the apparent concessions these women made to
their husbands' careers. Most of the women who became Foreign Service
wives between 1905 and 1941 were well educated (many of them college-
educated), reflecting the benefits of their class status, but only a few had
embarked on careers before marrying, which was not surprising considering
the era. Fewer still openly identified themselves as feminists, or had engaged
in any kind of traditional political activism. Foreign Service wives in this
time period instead appear to have embraced their identity as the "wife of"
a diplomat in order to also embrace the opportunities that came with the
position. Former Foreign Service wives who were interviewed in the 1980s
were therefore perplexed by the desire of a new generation of wives for
"careers of their own, outside the Foreign Service." Dorothy Emmerson,
who started in the Foreign Service in the 1930s, was frustrated whenever
someone asked her if she regretted not pursuing a career, because she
assumed that she already did have a career as a Foreign Service wife.
Similarly, Naomi Matthews was "a little impatient with women
who ... don't want to be associated with their husbands. ,,24 Foreign Service
wives in the early twentieth century describe themselves not as "helpmates"
to their husbands, but as highly visible associates or partners who "joined,"
rather than "married into," the Foreign Service and who felt a "strong sense
of responsibility" and duty to the Foreign Service, just as, for example, the
wives of British colonial administrators personally identified themselves
with the official British Imperial presence throughout the Empire. 25
American Foreign Service wives recognized that American diplomatic prac-
tice depended on them, but they also realized that they benefited in many
ways from their status as diplomatic wives.
Before she married Bert Matthews, for instance, Naomi Meffert "loved
the thought of life in the Foreign Service" and was "delighted" about Bert's
career plans. Reflecting on her life in the Foreign Service many years later,
she appreciated the fact that her husband "always said 'we'" when he
referred to their life and work in the Foreign Service. 26 Other wives have
described their lives in the Foreign Service, and their relationship with their
husbands, in very similar ways, reflecting an unconscious illustration of
what Hanna Papanek has called the "two person single career." As Eliza
Pavalko and Glen Elder explain, some wives are "so highly involved in their
husbands' careers" that they believe their work is "a true partnership."27
This theory, which seems to describe the experiences of many Foreign
Service wives, defines the work a wife performs to further her husband's
career as something that will also significantly benefit her, both because of
the status she gains with her husband's promotions and because of the
potential for her own personal fulfillment. Wives in the early twentieth
160 Molly M.Wood

century did not advocate for formal recognition of their roles in the Service,
or for freedom from their diplomatic duties in order to pursue other voca-
tions, because they believed they already had important and fulfilling
careers in the Service. It was only because a later generation of wives, mostly
in the 1960s, advocated for formal changes in the Foreign Service that the
State Department issued the 1972 Directive that recognized wives as
independent individuals with no formal responsibility to the Foreign
Service.
Wives most clearly "assisted" their husbands in the social arena. One
wife remembered that her "entire life" in the Foreign Service in the 1930s
"was to be devoted to being the best possible hostess. "28 Other wives
explained how they "entered into the picture in public relations and making
friends," arguing that "one of the best ways to get to know people is to relax
over a pleasant meal, and usually a great deal of business was conducted at
the same time." Enloe has observed that, given the family backgrounds of
most Foreign Service wives, "hostessing was what they had been raised to
do. "29 We might misinterpret Enloe's statement as an indictment of Foreign
Service wives and their seemingly frivolous lives until reading further about
the ways in which, as Enloe explains, "hostessing" should be taken seriously
as work, and especially as an integral part of diplomatic activity. As John
Foster wrote about the Foreign Service in 1906, "Personal acquaintance
with influential people in governmental and political life is often helpful in
advancing the business of the legation."3o It was at the social occasions so
crucial to the conduct of diplomacy, where representatives from the host
country, the other members of the diplomatic corps, and local dignitaries
and visitors mixed and mingled, that these kinds of acquaintances were
nurtured. As a gendered responsibility, hostessing reflected common
assumptions about women's supposed natural abilities at making people
feel comfortable, but the role of "official hostess" was also considered to be
a great honor at diplomatic affairs. 31 In order to ensure that the very best
women filled this role in the wake of President Roosevelt's 1905 effort to
professionalize the service, officials in Washington noted each officer's
marital status and assessed whether "the members of his family contribute
to his standing and reputation in the community."32 After the 1924 Rogers
Act, the State Department evaluation process became more systematic, as
members of the new Foreign Service Personnel Board explicitly discussed
the expectations that wives would cultivate a "host of friends" and entertain
"with a kindly and likeable disposition."33
Yet Foreign Service officers and their wives rarely defined exactly what
the wives did, an omission that contributes to the difficulties we face in
analyzing their roles and strengthens widespread assumptions about the
luxurious nature of Foreign Service life. As one former diplomat's wife
explained, "The social aspect of diplomatic life is much maligned," and has
generally not been taken seriously outside of the Foreign Service. 34
Therefore, women such as Edith O'Shaughnessy, who organized lavish
dinner parties, worried about her clothes, and "cultivated" influential
 Diplomatic Wives 161

friendships in Vienna in 1910 and 1911, have been dismissed as superficial,

when in fact O'Shaughnessy was only doing her job by initiating the social
contacts necessary for the conduct of diplomacy (and for her husband's
career).35 Most Foreign Service officers and their wives in the early twentieth
century relied on family money to supplement their small Foreign Service
salaries and to absorb extra expenses, notably those pertaining to the
"social aspects of diplomatic life." They did not receive any allowances for
expenses such as rent or entertaining until the 1924 Rogers Act reforms.
Generally, therefore, only young men or women of independent means were
likely to be successful in the Foreign Service.
Lucy and Ellis Briggs, for instance, were well prepared for this kind of
life. Briggs was a Smith College graduate and the daughter of a New York
attorney. Her husband was also raised comfortably. He graduated from
Dartmouth College and took the new Foreign Service exam several years
later in 1925. When the couple married in 1928, Briggs duly observed that
"the salaries were extremely small and it was necessary, if you went to any
big [important] post, to pay a great deal out of your own pocket."36
O'Shaughnessy, on the other hand, had no such resources. She hoped marriage
would bring social and financial stability, but a series of bad investments left
Nelson O'Shaughnessy's father unable to help support the couple.
O'Shaugnessy even considered leaving town at the beginning of the social
season in Vienna in 1907, because his "humiliating [financial] circum-
stances" would prevent the couple from participating fully in the important
social life of the diplomatic corps. Ultimately, he stayed in town but placed
the responsibility on his wife to use her "good sense" to try to find some
way to continue their social obligations even in the face of financial
distress. 37
The Foreign Service proved to be a financial disappointment for
O'Shaughnessy, but she still relished the excitement of the diplomatic life, as
did many other young women. Anna Smith appreciated the chance to
pursue an adventure when she married u.S. consul Carl Kemp in 1919.
After the untimely death of Kemp's first wife, he proposed to Smith in 1919
and she quickly accepted. Kemp in all likelihood had recognized already the
difficulty of carrying on his consular duties without a wife, while the shy
and quiet Smith had jumped at the chance to begin a life of travel and
adventure. 38 Many Foreign Service wives resembled other groups of women
travelers in the way they used their international travel experience as a route
to excitement and adventure. 39 Because of their quasi-official status in the
Foreign Service, however, wives held unusual positions of responsibility,
often acting independently of their husbands. When Foreign Service officers
received transfer orders from the State Department, for example, they often
moved immediately to the new post and usually lived temporarily in a hotel.
They left their wives behind to make all the logistical arrangements for the
"arduous" task, in this era of preflight travel, of transporting all the house-
hold possessions, the "mounds of luggage," and young children to a new
city.4o Yvonne Jordan recalled the difficulties she encountered when trying
162 Molly M.Wood

to move, with an infant son, from Haiti to Helsinki in 1922. Jordan met and
married her husband, Curtis, when he was stationed with the u.s. Army in
France after World War I. Jordan took the u.s. Foreign Service exam in
Paris in 1919, just before his discharge from the Army. He passed the exam
and was posted immediately to Haiti. Less than a year later, he was trans-
ferred to Finland, but his wife was so close to delivering their first baby that
she had to stay behind, have the baby, and wait seven more weeks before
leaving Haiti to catch up to her husband. 41 In addition, she had to arrange
and pay for her and the baby's travel out of pocket after being informed by
the State Department that "the travel expense fund was exhausted. "42
As they moved from post to post because of the often haphazard and
frustrating nature of overseas assignments, the wife's first responsibility
upon arrival at any new post was to find and settle into suitable housing. As
Beryl Smedley has stated in her study of the British Foreign Service, "It was
a matter of national pride that diplomats should be well-housed." Though
the State Department assumed no responsibility for providing its officers
with suitable housing, officials still expected that American diplomats and
their families should also be "well-housed" in homes that, as the daughter
of one former Foreign Service wife explained, "reflected American tastes
and customs," in order to most effectively represent the United States
overseas. 43 The American home overseas served as an important symbol of
American status in the host country. Officials recognized that a wife who
finds and "maintains an attractive home" could be "a very real asset to her
husband in his task of representing the u.S.,,44 Therefore, upon moving to
Bucharest in 1919, Kemp was thrilled when she finally found a house with
"running water in the dressing room.,,45 Such a luxury was important not
only for her family's comfort and for the ways in which running water
would make it easier to keep an "attractive home," but also because such an
amenity was a visible reminder of American prosperity and status. In some
remote locations, the homes of American officials might serve as a means of
"spreading civilization" or modernization in the same way that Strobel has
described the British colonial administrator's home in the "outposts of
Empire. "46 Depending on the location, the" American" home was also a key
representation of American superiority and sophistication in comparison to
the dwellings around it.
Wives quickly learned that their clothing sent similar messages about
material prosperity and demonstrated adherence to diplomatic protocol.
For instance, Emmerson, who claimed to know "nothing about the Foreign
Service" when she married her husband John in 1934, received explicit
instructions to "wear a long dress-with train-long sleeves, high neck, hat,
gloves, no white, no black" when she was to be presented to the Imperial
Family of Japan in 1935. By conforming to these instructions she communi-
cated a message of compliance and goodwill. If she had deviated from
protocol in some way, as she once unintentionally did by wearing a dark
brown outfit instead of black during mourning for the king of England, she
might cause great offenseY Wives worried about sending other negative
 Diplomatic Wives I 63

messages with their physical appearance as well, as when O'Shaughnessy

worried on the eve of an engagement in Vienna in 1907, "I have of course
NOTHING to wear." She meant, of course, that she had nothing new to
wear to an important social engagement, and she would not want the others
in the diplomatic corps to think that the wife of the American Second
Secretary did not have enough money to buy new clothes. 48 It was essential
that the wife of an American official, in her own representative capacity,
maintain her position as a role model. Both feminine clothing and a suitable
home served as tangible domestic markers that presented American culture
in the most positive manner possible.
Social events held in the home were the primary opportunity to "show
off" American culture and prosperity and communicate subtle messages of
compliance or disapproval. As Katherine Hughes explained, "Whom a wife
invites to the diplomatic residence for tea-or more importantly, whom she
does not invite-mayor may not reflect her government's policies, but
others may perceive that it does. "49 A home that adequately represented the
United States also served as an informal but political space for the conduct
of diplomacy. 50 As an unofficial space, as Allgor has explained, the home
"allows the official players [the diplomats] room to maneuver and negotiate." 51
One observer of the U.S. Foreign Service in 1936 extolled the importance of
a "woman's salon" in the home. 52 The more informal nature of the social
interactions with wives took some of the pressure off the diplomats and
created a more open and friendly environment. A Foreign Service officer
relied on his wife to read and interpret both conversations and behavior, and
then relay information accurately to him later, since he could not be every-
where at once and because guests would interact differently with his wife
than with him. In other words, a Foreign Service wife served in many ways
as an extension of her husband. As Briggs explained, "a man who was per-
haps not especially gifted was greatly helped by a wife who was friendly and
who was interested in what was going on and who was helpful both in
personal and professional ways."53 Cecil Lyon, for instance, relied on his
wife, Elsie, to facilitate the exchange of "social and political messages" for
him and to "[break] the ice" for him in his new post in Japan, since she had
lived there for many years already with her mother and father, and "she had
all these Japanese girlfriends" who now "had husbands" with whom Lyon
needed to be acquainted in order to do his job as a diplomat. 54
In their ongoing assessment of Foreign Service officers' social usefulness,
specifically their "standing and popularity with the people of the countr[ies]
to which [they are] accredited," State Department officials discussed as well
their expectations about wives' social activities. 55 They relied on wives to
reach out to local women in each host country, and to work with them in
local charities and volunteer groups. Because their activities took them into
different neighborhoods, wives often knew the local environment, and the
locals themselves, better than their husbands who were working all day in
the Embassy. As Elizabeth Cabot remembered, when she was in Rio de
Janeiro, "I had to go to market. I had to move around [her emphasis] ... it
164 Molly M.Wood

made you link up with people."56 Jordan was commended, in fact, for her
particular success in "socializing with the natives."57 Matthews explained
that when she and her husband were in Australia in the 1930s she "was with
the Australians much of the time ... That's what you want to do. That's
what you are there for."58 American Foreign Service wives were therefore
seen as role models for the native population, especially the women, with
whom they interacted on a regular basis through volunteer work and
social calls.
Wives generally divulged few particulars, however, about the volunteer
work they performed in the local communities and their other interactions
with the locals. Briggs acknowledged that the work was "a very satisfying
way to spend your time" but gave few details about the work she performed.
Her subsequent comments reveal slightly more about her role. "You're not
only helping other people," she stated, "but you're doing the right thing by
your husband," and "you're making the Americans welcome."59 A wife's
volunteer activities were more than simple charity. The greater importance
was the prestige she brought to her husband and to her position as a role
model because her good deeds helped to make Americans "welcome" in
the local community. Because there was so much emphasis on creating
positive perceptions, however, wives were quite limited in what they could
say about a host country or people. As Catherine Cluett remembered,
"Regardless of the country, never say you do not like the people. "60 If a wife
complained or allowed any classified information to become public, it could
be not only embarrassing but potentially dangerous either to American
policy or to her husband's career. Another wife remarked, "You have to be
very guarded" and "very careful about what you say. You can't give your
feelings freely." Sometimes it was easier for wives to pretend they had no
interest in or ability to engage in political discourse, as when Emmerson
claimed that she "didn't know enough to participate ... in political
discussion." Equally implausibly, she insisted that her husband shared
"classified" information with her only once in his entire career, so that she
would not have to carry the "burden" of secrecy.61 The hesitancy to voice
political opinions, and the instinct to protect her husband's reputation,
remained strong for most wives even many years after retiring from the
Service. This reticence limits our understanding of American Foreign Service
wives' perceptions of the native populations they encountered, but gives us
more insight into the pressure American wives felt as role models.
As a result of this reluctance, very few former Foreign Service wives have
written publicly about their lives. 62 The voices of most other former Foreign
Service wives have remained largely silent until the Foreign Service Spouse
Oral History Program, initiated by the Association of American Foreign
Service Women (AAFSW), began in 1986 to interview former Foreign
Service spouses. 63 The shared experiences between most interviewers,
themselves either current or former Foreign Service wives, and their subjects
have given us interview transcripts that are rich in detail, but also reflective
of the AAFSW desire to record for the first time the specific kinds of
 Diplomatic Wives 165

experiences and responsibilities that are absent from the current historical
record. Interviewers therefore steer the conversations to subjects such as
home life overseas, travel, the culture and physical landscape of places, the
people they encountered overseas, the role of women in different cultures,
their duties as homemakers, entertaining, volunteer activity, and their chil-
dren. They seldom ask wives to elaborate on the politics of each post, unless
there was a specific crisis-wartime evacuation, revolution, controversial
election-and even then, wives focused more on explaining the logistical
arrangements that were necessary to weather each storm, only rarely com-
menting on American policy. While their apparent lack of political engage-
ment in these interviews could be largely attributed to the lingering reticence
about discussing politics in public, they also reflected the goals of the
AAFSW interviewers, who were interested in showing what wives really did
all day long, rather than in rehashing American policy in each post. Wives'
opinions about the politics of each situation, or the diplomatic relation-
ship between the United States and each country, are therefore less impor-
tant than understanding their roles as political players in each specific
context. Wives knew their influence did not come through formal discus-
sion of policy. Their political influence, they understood, came much
more subtly through their social, domestic, and representational duties
and responsibilities.
In each American mission overseas, for instance, wives juggled the per-
sonalities and needs unique to each location, playing the diplomatic version
of "office politics." Yvonne Jordan arrived in Helsinki in 1922, for example,
as the wife of a vice-consul, a very low level position in the Foreign Service
hierarchy that should not have required her to playa leading role in the
Legation's social life, only to find that she would in fact have to assume a
large number of responsibilities since the new American minister in Finland
was, as Jordan remembered, "a political appointee from Beloit, Kansas"
who had no experience in diplomatic activity and "had never been away"
from the United States. "He knew nothing about etiquette, absolutely
nothing," Jordan continued, "and he knew nothing about diplomatic life
either." His wife came to Helsinki only for a short visit, and then returned
to the United States, leaving her husband without a hostess. Since both
Jordan and her husband judged the American minister incompetent, her
husband took over many of his official duties at the Legation and Jordan
"did all his entertaining" and "arrang[edj all his dinner parties."64
Everyone, from State Department officials to the American minister to
Jordan herself, simply assumed that she would take responsibility for man-
aging the important social aspects of the minister's job and that she would
do so with tact and grace, without causing any jealousies or ill will. It was
common, in fact, for the wives of other officers at the same post to have to
"fill in" as official hostess for bachelor officers. 65 The Jordans reflect here a
common complaint among the lower ranking career officers-that the polit-
ical appointees to high-ranking positions were rarely competent in their
conduct of the job, leaving the underpaid and largely unappreciated career
166 Molly M.Wood

men and their wives to pick up the pieces. Naomi Matthews, a young wife
in her second post at Sydney, Australia in 1937, found herself in a situation
similar to Jordan's when "the wife of the consul was ill and not active much
of the time." Matthews was called upon to assume responsibility for many
social functions. She concluded that "to be so involved at that age made it
very interesting and very exciting," even though she was under the "close
scrutiny" of the consul general himself.66
Normally, were it not for her illness, it would have been the consul's wife
and not the consul himself who would have kept a close eye on Matthews.
By custom and practice, since there was no formal protocol training for new
Foreign Service wives, the senior-ranking wives trained younger wives in
matters of protocol, social etiquette, logistics, and living conditions at
different postS. 67 While some wives remembered serving under kind and
competent senior wives, it was still widely observed among the junior ranks
that there were a rather large number of "some pretty frightful," "difficult,"
or "unreasonable" women who "tended to terrify the wives of the young
officers.,,68 Elsie Grew Lyon remembered that there were "always wives
who would ... put you down a few notches" while Matthews acknowl-
edged that such women could "make a young wife miserable," but saw no
sense in complaining about it because "it doesn't last forever" and because
such mistreatment by these women would hopefully teach younger women
"how not to be" when they reached that point in their career. Lucy
Briggs said she was "lucky" because she "never had to serve under a very
domineering wife. "69
There was indeed a chasm separating the senior wives from the younger
wives that reflected the hierarchical nature of the Foreign Service and created
relationships of power and authority between the wives. While senior wives
enjoyed status, some security, positions of leadership, and the material
benefits of high rank, they also generally carried the most pressing responsi-
bilities. As one longtime Foreign Service wife remembered, "No party is
considered a complete success unless the highest ranking officer is at least
represented," which meant that "his wife is often called upon to substitute
for him. "70 As her husband's prestige grew with increasing rank, the wife
was called upon more often to serve as his representative. Some theories
about women and work suggest that wives with more duties and responsi-
bilities directly related to their husbands' careers were the most "fulfilled,"
but many Foreign Service wives looked at the situation more realistically,
acknowledging that senior wives had the more difficult and stressful positions
(which might account at least partly for their sometimes notoriously bad
behavior toward younger wives).71 Life at the top could be lonely. Many
senior wives felt keenly the pressure of the spotlight, which they often
referred to as the "goldfish bowl," where "you've got to be so careful"
not to offend anyone. Lyon explained, for instance, that "you can't have
close ties with people in the Embassy or you're playing favorites."n The
perception that the American mission treated some members of the diplomatic
community better than others could send misleading or even dangerous
 Diplomatic Wives 167

messages about the relative status of various representatives of different

countries.
Foreign Service wives had to avoid not only the jealousies and misunder-
standings that could arise between representatives of different countries, but
were also responsible for, as one wife described it, "preserving harmony
within the official [State Department] family" by keeping a "motherly eye"
on the younger wives?3 Indeed, the role of motherhood and the metaphor
of the "official family" were important for defining the wife's roles in the
Foreign Service within a nonthreatening discourse of domesticity. Wives
regularly, and with enthusiasm, referred to Foreign Service life before World
War II as "one big family" where "you sort of knew everybody."74 Lyon
understood better than many the notion of family and duty in the Foreign
Service since she and her sisters all grew up in a Foreign Service family
headed by Joseph and Alice Grew. It was no coincidence that Lyon and her
sisters all married Foreign Service officers, for they all knew exactly what
kind of life they wanted. As Lyon's sister Lilla Grew Moffat later remarked,
growing up in the service gave them excellent training for "the responsibilities
and obligations and duties" of the Foreign Service?5 As the Grew family
understood, childbearing and childrearing were important aspects of the
work of representation, for children sent positive and healthy messages out
to each host country about American prosperity. Alvah has noted, for
instance, that the decision to send military families abroad after World War II
reflects "assumptions about women and children as representatives of
American understanding and goodwill abroad. "76 In order to complete the
job of representation, American diplomats overseas needed to exhibit the
ideal American family.
Ironically, because of their many other duties, Foreign Service wives
rarely had time to care for their children themselves. As Jordan stated
simply, "It was difficult to care for a child" while juggling all her other
responsibilities. 77 Many wives exhibited frustrations typical of working
mothers, such as the difficulty of finding adequate child care. A nurse or a
nanny was necessary so the wife could be free to engage in social activities
at all hours of the day and night. One wife was "desperate" to find a nanny
two weeks before departing for Buenos Aires "because social life was so
intense down there." Another wife in Lima warned Dorothy Emmerson
when she arrived, "If you stay in Lima you will not take care of them [her
children] because the social life will be extra-ordinarily heavy."78 The nanny
was essential in order to allow wives to perform their social duties, but the
nanny was also a matter of American prestige, as was the presence of other
domestic servants in the American mission.
The domestic work associated with the conduct of diplomacy could
never have happened without the help of native servants. Wives in American
missions overseas assumed full responsibility for the hiring, firing, and
supervision of servants because they supposedly possessed, as one former
Foreign Service wife explained, the "exquisite tact, infinite patience and
eternal vigilance" necessary for handling servants most effectively?9
168 Molly M.Wood

(Certainly, these were some of the very same qualities that enabled wives to
interact with other diplomats, guests, and officials so effectively at the end-
less social gatherings.) Many of their supervisory duties, and the difficulties
about which they complained, mirrored the experiences of middle-class and
upper-class women in the United States, many of whom still lived with
domestic servants in their homes in the first few decades of the twentieth
century. Women who were running households, whether supervising one or
two servants or a whole houseful, invariably complained about the increas-
ing difficulty of finding and retaining competent servants no matter where
they lived. 80 Women in the United States specifically complained about the
difficulty of finding white, native-born American servants, and were forced
to rely either on the labor of black women in the South or immigrant
women, most often Irish, in other parts of the United States. Lucy Salmon,
who wrote a well-known study of American domestic service at the end of
the nineteenth century, noted many of the "difficulties" the "average
family" encountered when "assimilating into its domestic life those who
are of a different nationality and who consequently hold different indus-
trial, social, religious, and political beliefs. "81 Imagine, then, the difficulties
faced by American women who tried to "assimilate" their indigenous
servants into an American household in Latin America, India, China, or
even Europe.
As Strobel and others have shown, responsibility for servant manage-
ment in foreign countries could be terribly complex. 82 Yet this responsibility
fell directly on the wives, who usually had to "train" their servants to run
the house, cook and serve the food, and attend to the family in the proper
"American" fashion, thus revealing American domestic superiority. Most
servants spoke little English, and few Foreign Service officers (and none of
their wives) received any formal language training before taking their new
posts, though many wives had studied languages, and others took the ini-
tiative to begin to learn new languages when they became engaged to young
diplomats. Even if wives were adept at learning new languages, as many of
them claimed to be, some had a much easier task than others. Could Kemp
really expect to learn "Rumanian" before her arrival in Bucharest? Jordan
struggled with Finnish, before giving up and declaring it "a fiendish
language."83 In fact, many wives learned languages more quickly than their
husbands, primarily as a result of their intimate daily interaction with their
servants. Briggs did not speak any Spanish before going to Peru, but quickly
learned to say in Spanish "you must" in order to run the new household and
establish her authority with the servants. 84 But the language barrier was not
the worst of the cultural problems. Jordan managed eleven household
servants in India in the late 1930s, an especially difficult task due to the
complicated caste system that strictly dictated the tasks each servant could
perform. "Everything was regulated," Jordan recalled, and she had to mas-
ter the rules in order to "give out the orders" every morning. 85 Another
longtime Foreign Service wife noted that supervising the servants was often
"in itself a full time job."86
 Diplomatic Wives 169

Many young Foreign Service wives complained about their servants in an

effort to cover up their insecurities, admitting only later that they had ini-
tially been very uncomfortable supervising servants. As the daughter of a
prominent lawyer in New Rochelle, New York, Briggs had "grown up with
servants," but she had "never handled servants [her] self. "87 Many young
Foreign Service wives in the 1920s and 1930s, including Briggs, relied on
childhood observations of their mothers, their intuition, and perhaps a
popular guidebook or ladies' magazine article to help them negotiate the
highly personal servant-mistress relationship when they set up their own
households. 88 Some young wives also turned to their more senior colleagues,
who generally taught them an aspect of diplomatic protocol that
Arlie Hochschild has referred to as a "technical message system" or
"subterranean communication." This kind of communication with servants
through prearranged hand signals or eye contact with trusted servants would
enable wives to orchestrate the kinds of large dinner parties expected of
important American officials. 89 No wonder Emmerson claimed that supervis-
ing servants was, for her, "the most difficult part of the Foreign Service."9o
Servants were, after all, a very visible part of any American home at which
diplomatic functions were hosted. The maintenance of the home, and of
American prestige and status, depended in part on the visibility and efficiency
of those servants working under the supervision of American wives.
Whether these wives working overseas found "trusted" servants or strug-
gled mightily to find good help, they universally reflected the cultural, class,
and racial stereotypes evident in an anonymous tongue-in-cheek 1923
article in the American Consular Bulletin entitled "A Consul's Wife: An
Efficiency Report by One Who Knows." In this brief essay, a new young
diplomat's wife "went halfway round the world to take charge of an orien-
tal household of fourteen turbaned and mostly bearded servants. "91 In their
unavoidable interactions with servants, wives were thrust into formal posi-
tions of authority that added to the burden of perceived racial and class
superiority in most parts of the world, while living in a foreign culture about
which they understood little. They had always to maintain a distance from
the servants. They often covered their fear of the unknown and anxiety
about their abilities with predictable stereotypes about domestic servants
who were either earnest but inept, or totally incompetent. Matthews, for
instance, complimented her servants because they "liked activity" even
though they "needed attention, lots of attention," while Kemp remembered
in Budapest that "my new cook and maid come tonight and Sunday I hope
to have eight for dinner. I trust this maid can serve without dropping every-
thing she touches.,,92 Similar complaints were common in the United States,
of course, but the stakes were perhaps not quite so high as in the foreign
environments where wives' success at "handling" their servants reflected
directly on their abilities as models of American domesticity and as unofficial
representatives of the U.S. government.
Most of the former Foreign Service wives described in this study went on
to long and successful careers in the Foreign Service, followed by active and
170 Molly M.Wood

generally happy retirements. Matthews, Lyon, and Briggs eventually became

"ambassadresses," an invented term that nonetheless conveyed an impor-
tant professional status on the wife of an ambassador. Emmerson became
the wife of a minister, Kemp became the wife of a consul general, and the
Jordans had a long and successful career in a variety of consular and diplo-
matic posts. Only O'Shaugnessy left the Foreign Service after an abbreviated
tenure when her husband retired from the Service in 1916. While her hus-
band used his training in the law to move into another career, O'Shaugnessy
used her experiences as a diplomat's wife to write her well-received book
about Mexico in 1916. The book briefly transformed O'Shaugnessy into an
authority on Mexico. In the 1916 presidential campaign, she used this polit-
ical expertise to campaign against President Woodrow Wilson, whose
Mexican policies she criticized vehemently.93 This brief period of political
activism was followed by a career of some minor success as an author of
fiction in the 1920s.
All of the wives surveyed here, even O'Shaughnessy, saw their quasi-official
positions in the Foreign Service as positions of considerable importance and
authority. Their work for the Foreign Service gave them status and visibility
because a wife's actions, including her choice of wardrobe, her seating of
guests at dinner parties, and her "manner toward them," served as a conduit
for political messages between diplomats that fell under the radar of
official government communication but conveyed, nevertheless, important
information. 94 Between 1905 and 1941, many American Foreign Service
wives spoke explicitly about their "careers" in the Foreign Service. A schol-
arly study of the U.S. Foreign Service in 1936 also recognized that wives
played important roles in diplomatic posts, indicating that officials in
Washington and abroad expected wives would not only oversee the
"domestic affairs" of officers, but would also "contribute to the intellectual
and social brilliance of the [American] Embassy by attracting people of
distinction through her personality and charm. "95 A wife's smooth manage-
ment of her traditional domestic and social responsibilities-home, family,
and entertaining-was therefore crucial for establishing and maintaining
American representation in diplomatic missions all over the world.

Notes
Molly M. Wood is associate professor of history at Wittenberg University in Springfield,
Ohio, where she teaches U.S. history, U.S. foreign relations, and women's history. She is
currently working on a manuscript exploring the roles of women and children in the U.S.
Foreign Service. She can be contacted at mwood@wittenberg.edu
1. Francis Keene to Florence Keene, May 25, 1914, Box 3, Keene Papers, Manuscripts
Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC.
2. Earl Packer, oral history interview, Foreign Service Oral History Project, Special
Collections, Launiger Library, Georgetown University, transcript, p. 23, hereafter
FSHOP; and Willard Beaulac, Career Ambassador (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1951), 181.
 Diplomatic Wives 171

3. Graham Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice (New York:

D. Appleton-Century, 1936),275.
4. See the 1972 Directive reproduced in Homer Calkin, Women in the Department of
State: Their Role in Foreign Affairs (Washington, DC: Department of State, 1977),
Appendix 1.
5. See, for example, Personnel Evaluations, Records of the Foreign Service Personnel
Board, 1924-1934, Report of the Board of Review, 1925-1926, Diplomatic Branch,
General Records of the U.S. Department of State, RG 59, Stack 250, National
Archives, College Park, MD, hereafter GR.
6. Ten years earlier, in 1895, President Grover Cleveland instituted exams for low-level
consular officials, but until 1924 the consular and diplomatic services within the
Foreign Service remained separate, so Cleveland's Executive Order did not apply to
those in the diplomatic service. For more background see Lawrence Gelfand,
"Towards a Merit System for the American Diplomatic Service, 1900-1930," Irish
Studies in International Affairs 2, no. 4 (1988): 49-63; Martin Weil, A Pretty Good
Club (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978),21; Rachel West, The Department of State
on the Eve of the First World War (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1978);
Henry Mattox, The Twilight of Amateur Diplomacy (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 1989).
7. Minutes of June 24, 1924 meeting, Records of the Foreign Service Personnel Board,
1924, Diplomatic Branch, GR.
8. Mary Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism, 1883-1947
(New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 5. See also Margaret Strobel,
European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, IN: University of
Indiana Press, 1991). On military women see Donna Alvah, "'Unofficial
Ambassadors': American Military Families Overseas and Cold War Foreign
Relations, 1945-1965" (PhD diss., University of California at Davis, 2000),1.
9. See, for example, Edward Crapol, ed., Women and American Foreign Policy, 2d ed.
(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992); Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); and Harriet Alonso, Peace as a
Woman's Issue (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993).
10. See Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1988). On gender and U.S. foreign relations, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas,
Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1990), and Maneuvers: The International Politics of
Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). See
also Emily Rosenberg, "Gender," Journal of American History 77 (June 1990):
116-24; Andrew Rotter, "Gender Relations, Foreign Relations: The United States
and South Asia, 1947-1964," Journal of American History 81, no. 2 (1994):
518-42; Emily Rosenberg, "Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the
'American Century,''' Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (1999): 479-97; and Frank
Costigliola, "The Nuclear Family: Tropes of Gender and Pathology in the Western
Alliance," Diplomatic History 21, no. 2 (1997): 163-83.
11. See Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire; Procida, Married to
the Empire; Ann Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities
and the Boundaries of Rule," Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 1
(1989): 134-61, and "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual
Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures," American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989):
634-60; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women
and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994); and Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of u.s.
Imperialism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
172 Molly M.Wood

12. See, for example, Richard Hume Werking, The Master Architects (Lexington, KY:
University of Kentucky Press, 1977).
13. Beaulac, Career Ambassador, 134.
14. John Foster, The Practice of Diplomacy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906),6; and
Beaulac, Career Ambassador, 20.
15. Hilary Callen, "The Premise of Dedication: Notes towards an Ethnography of
Diplomat's Wives," in Perceiving Women, ed. Shirley Ardener (New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1975), 89.
16. Arlie Hochschild, "The Role of the Ambassador's Wife: An Exploratory Study,"
Journal of Marriage and the Family 31, no. 1 (1969): 76.
17. The literature on women and politics is voluminous. See, for example, Maureen
Flanagan, "Gender and Urban Political Reform," American Historical Review 95
(October 1990): 1032-50; Melanie Gustafson, "Partisan Women in the Progressive
Era," Journal of Women's History 9 (Summer 1997): 8-30; and Louise Tilly and
Patricia Gurin, eds., Women, Politics and Change (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1990).
18. Flanagan, "Gender and Urban Political Reform," 1033n7; Alvah, "Unofficial
Ambassadors," 88; and Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics (Charlottesville, VA:
University Press of Virginia, 2000), 1. Karen Blair has coined the term "domestic
feminism" to refer to the extension of women's domestic traits into the public sphere
in The Clubwoman as Feminist (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1980).
19. Burton, Burdens of History, 12; and Strobel, European Women and the Second
British Empire, 17.
20. Mildred Ringwalt, interview transcript, Associates of the American Foreign Service
Worldwide, Special Collections, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University,
Washington DC, 13, hereafter AAFSW. Beginning in 1986, the Associates of the
American Foreign Service Worldwide (AAFSW), a nonprofit organization founded in
1960 to represent Foreign Service spouses, employees, and retirees, conducted
hundreds of interviews with Foreign Service spouses, mostly wives. Copies of these
interview transcripts are housed in Special Collections at Georgetown University's
Lauinger Library (Washington, DC) as part of their Foreign Service Oral History
Project. I am grateful to the Special Collections staff at Georgetown for giving me
access to these transcripts when they were still uncataloged. I must express my grat-
itude as well to Jewell Fenzi, author of Married to the Foreign Service: An Oral
History of the American Diplomatic Spouse (New York: Twayne, 1994) for her
generous personal correspondence, and to Margaret Teich for her help at the
AAFSW office in Washington DC. The original interview transcripts are now located
at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training in Arlington, Virginia.
21. Dagmar Kane, AAFSW, 3.
22. Lucy Briggs, AAFSW, 1-2.
23. There is, of course, a valid argument to be made for the existence of an informal
American empire during this period, and certainly there were military missions
abroad as well. See Wexler, Tender Violence, 52 for a discussion of the "salutary
nature of American domesticity and the benign influence of the domestic woman."
24. Dorothy Emmerson, AAFSW, 31; and Naomi Matthews, AAFSW, 11.
25. Many wives use similar language to describe their roles. The text quoted here reflects
the reading of numerous interview transcripts. On British wives, see Procida,
Married to the Empire, 1.
26. Matthews, AAFSW, 4, 11, and 13.
27. Hannah Pampanek as quoted in Eliza Pavalko and Glen Elder, "Women behind the
Men," Gender and Society 7, no. 4 (1993): 548, 557.
28. Ruth Little, AAFSW, 6.
 Diplomatic Wives 173

29. Hilda Lewis, AAFSW, 7; and Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 96.
30. Foster, The Practice of Diplomacy, 115.
31. "Diplomats' Wives Win Hostess Disputes as Roosevelt Bans Chiefs Naming
Cousins," New York Times, January 12, 1936, 1.
32. See 1907 inspection form quoted in Werking, Master Architects, 110.
33. See Personnel Evaluations, Records of the Foreign Service Personnel Board,
1924-1934, Report of the Board of Review, 1925-1926, Diplomatic Branch, GR.
34. Beatrice Russell, Living in State (New York: D. McKay, 1959), 83-84; and
Hochschild, "The Role of the Ambassador's Wife," 85.
35. Molly Wood, "An American Diplomat's Wife in Mexico" (PhD diss., University of
South Carolina, 1998). Allgor has used the term "social work" to describe these
interactions in her study of Washington women in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. See Allgor, Parlor Politics.
36. Briggs, AAFSW, 5.
37. Wood, "An American Diplomat's Wife in Mexico," 63-64.
38. Anna Kemp, AAFSW, 1-2 and 33-39.
39. See, for example, Eric Leed, The Mind of the Traveler (New York: Basic Books,
1991) for a discussion of the status and expertise conferred upon travelers. The
comparison between Foreign Service wives and other women travelers, such as mis-
sionaries, is useful for understanding the ways in which American women lived and
worked in foreign environments. Because of their semiofficial status, however, and
their primary identity as "wives," a more compelling parallel can be drawn with
military wives. I am grateful to Donna Alvah for discussions on this topic.
40. Jewell Fenzi, quoted in Elsie Lyon, AAFSW, 10; and Matthews, AAFSW, 8.
41. Yvonne Jordan, AAFSW, 1-2.
42. Ibid., 5. Legislation allowing for travel expenses for families had been passed in
1919, but this money was not yet readily available to most Foreign Service families.
43. Kemp, AAFSW, 52.
44. Beryl Smedley, Partners in Diplomacy (London: The Harley Press, 1991), 90; and
William Barnes and John Heath Morgan, The Foreign Service of the U.S.: Origins,
Development and Functions (Washington, DC: Department of State, Historical
Office, Bureau of Public Affairs, 1961), 326.
45. Kemp, AAFSW, 40-41.
46. Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire, 17.
47. Emmerson, AAFSW, la. Emmerson claimed she did not own a black dress and that
the senior wife told her to "go home and stay there until I got a black dress."
48. Wood, "An American Diplomat's Wife in Mexico," 62.
49. Hughes, Accidental Diplomat, 16-17.
50. See Fenzi, Married to the Foreign Service, 131. See also Strobel's description of
women's household responsibilities in the context of the British Empire. Unlike
military wives who were housed on military bases, diplomats were responsible for
obtaining their own housing.
51. Allgor, Parlor Politics, 88-89. See also Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, 97.
52. Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice, 275.
53. Briggs, AAFSW, 1.
54. Ambassador Cecil B. Lyon, oral history interview, October 26 and 27, 1988,
FSOHP.
55. Copy of circular no. 14336, June 19, 1908, Department of State, Box 1,
O'Shaughnessy Family Papers, New York Public Library, New York.
56. Elizabeth Cabot, AAFSW, 8-9.
57. Jordan, AAFSW, 21.
58. Matthews, AAFSW, 8.
174 Molly M.Wood

59. Briggs, AAFSW, 16.

60. Cluett, AAFSW, 2.
61. Briggs, AAFSW, 3; Jean Vance, AAFSW, 34; and Emmerson, AAFSW, 28.
62. O'Shaughnessy, who in 1916 published A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico, is one exception.
63. Fenzi, Married to the Foreign Service, xviii.
64. Jordan, AAFSW, 4 and 17.
65. Very occasionally, a bachelor Foreign Service officer might have another female
relative-a sister or mother-serve as his official hostess. The small number of
female Foreign Service Officers who served in the 1920s and 1930s were required to
be unmarried and clearly posed a dilemma for the State Department officials.
66. Matthews, AAFSW, 6.
67. As Jewell Fenzi has noted, the first official handbook for social matters, "Social
Usage in the Foreign Service," was not printed by the Department of State until
1957. Married in the Foreign Service, 18.
68. See, for instance, Matthews, AAFSW, 19.
69. Matthews, AAFSW, 19; and Briggs, AAFSW, 30.
70. Russell, Living in State, 84.
71. Pavalko and Elder, "Women Behind the Men," 548.
72. Elsie Lyon, AAFSW, 24.
73. Russell, Living in State, 84.
74. Matthews, AAFSW, 5.
75. Lilla Grew Moffat, AAFSW, 40.
76. Alvah, "Unofficial Ambassadors," 99.
77. Jordan, AAFSW, 8.
78. Cabot, AAFSW, 11; and Emmerson, AAFSW, 19.
79. Russell, Living in State, 48.
80. Katzman, Seven Days a Week (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978),223-24.
The numbers of domestic servants in the United States were beginning to fall by the
1920s and 1930s.
81. Lucy Salmon, Domestic Service (New York: Arno Press, 1972).
82. Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire, 22.
83. Jordan, AAFSW, 8; and Kemp, AAFSW, 42.
84. Briggs, AAFSW, 17.
85. Jordan, AAFSW, 31-32.
86. Fenzi quoted in Jordan, AAFSW, 31.
87. Emmerson, AAFSW, 22; and Briggs, AAFSW, 86.
88. Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 153.
89. Hochschild, "The Role of the Ambassador's Wife," 74n5, 86.
90. Emmerson, AAFSW, 22.
91. American Consular Bulletin 5, no. 1 (1923): 8.
92. Kemp, AAFSW, 61; and Matthews, AAFSW, 21.
93. For a full account see Wood, "An American Diplomat's Wife in Mexico," chap. 5.
94. Hochschild, "The Role of the Ambassador's Wife," 79.
95. Stuart, American Diplomatic and Consular Practice, 274-75.
 Chapter 8

The Flying Machine in the Garden: Parks and

Airports, 1918-1938

Janet R. Daly Bednarek

From Technology and Culture

Late in the evening of the last day of March 2003, Mayor Richard Daley
ordered bulldozers onto the runways at Meigs Field, Chicago's lakefront
general aviation airport. By early morning the heavy equipment had carved
large X's into the runways, dramatically marking them as closed to air
traffic. Though Daley may have hoped this would be the last act in a long
conflict with airport supporters, in a last-ditch effort to save the field, a
group called Friends of Meigs hastily developed a plan for the dual use of
the site as an airport and park. In their proposed scenario, Mayor Daley
could have his long-sought lakefront park, and pilots could continue to use
the airport, conveniently located near Chicago's downtown. But the Park
District of Chicago rejected the proposal in July 2003, seemingly sealing the
fate of Meigs Field.
If the effort to promote the dual use of that stretch of Chicago's lakefront
as an airport-park seemed perhaps an act of desperation, it nonetheless had
historical precedent. In the 1920s, as cities across the country first began to
build airports, park officials often took the lead. In some cases they did so
in the absence of enabling legislation. In others, states passed laws that for-
malized initial municipal efforts to respond to aviation developments. The
use of parkland for airports and of parks departments or commissions to
manage airports sparked a lively debate among park executives, recreation
supporters, city planners, and aviation experts between 1928 and 1930.
That debate involved long-standing tensions over definitions of the term
"park" and was complicated by uncertainty about the future of aviation.
The story of the connection between airports and parks during the 1920s
and 1930s weaves together a number of threads in the history of land use
and the history of technology. Arguments for dual-use airport-parks highlight
176 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

a point articulated by Leo Marx in his classic work The Machine in the
Garden: though some saw conflict in the introduction of technology into
natural or naturalistic settings, many Americans welcomed the machine into
the garden. 1 Second, as several scholars have pointed out, certain technolo-
gies have inspired both utilitarian and nonutilitarian uses. Thus, for example,
Cyril Stanley Smith argues that some technologies served artistic purposes
before being adopted for more practical applications. 2 And Susan Douglas
has noted that the U.S. Navy's early twentieth century efforts to exploit
radio technology for military communications were paralleled by a popular
movement to adapt the wireless to personal use. 3 The social construction of
a technology often involves dialogue between alternate visions, and though
one vision may become dominant, the others need not disappear. As
Douglas pointed out, radio certainly is most identified with its more practi-
cal military and commercial applications, but ham radio operators continue
to thrive.
Almost from the beginning, those involved in aviation foresaw practical
military uses for the airplane. But on the civilian side competing visions
emerged. From the earliest exhibition flyers through the barnstormers and
Hollywood scriptwriters, aviation was presented to the public as a form of
entertainment. Beginning in the 1920s, however, other aviation boosters,
including industry figures and government officials, began working to
change its image from one that emphasized thrills and daring to one focused
on safety and efficiency that could support commercial applications. By the
late 1930s, and certainly by World War II, this second, more utilitarian
vision had risen to dominance. 4
The debate over the nature of the airplane influenced thinking about
airports. The vision of the airplane as an entertainment or recreational
technology made the use of parkland for airports seem reasonable. When
commercial air travel was in its infancy, a significant majority of the
American public experienced aviation as a special event-the arrival in
town of a famed aviator, an air show or an air race, or other forms of
exhibition flying. Additionally, cities wishing to establish airports found it
expedient to use their existing power to acquire land for parks. Only as it
became more apparent that airplanes would become a form of regular
transportation did the plausibility of the airport-park connection diminish.
By that time, the late 1930s and early 1940s, the ownership and manage-
ment of airports was shifting to other organizations, such as airport
authorities. The early connection between airports and parks, however,
provides an insight into the period when aviation was young and its future
still unfolding.
This article will explore the relationship between parks and airports in
the 1920s and 1930s. It begins by examining the transformation of the
definition of a park from an idealized rural landscape to a location for mul-
tiple forms of recreation, both active and passive. Next, it explores the
debate over whether airports fit within that new definition. It then outlines
the legal framework in which local aviation boosters could employ a city's
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 177

power to acquire parkland for an airport. The focus then shifts to two case
studies: Omaha, Nebraska, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. During the 1920s
and 1930s local factors played perhaps the most important role in deter-
mining the pattern of airport development. While wider influences-such as
the passage of the Air Commerce Act, Charles Lindbergh's celebrated flight,
and the work of the Bureau of Air Commerce-certainly set important
parameters, local political, economic, and legal conditions shaped decisions.
Omaha and Minneapolis represent opposite extremes on a continuum of
action during this time period. In Omaha, the link between parks and the
airport was important but short-lived, as park officials proved unable to
rapidly develop the airport. In Minneapolis it remained in place until 1944,
as the park board proved highly capable of managing the facility. In both
cases, however, local officials clearly accepted a recreational function for
their airports.

The Meaning of Parks

From the time U.S. cities established the first great urban parks in the 1850s
until the present, people have argued over what constituted a proper park
purpose. 5 Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of New York
City's Central Park, envisioned their creation as the antithesis of the city, a
completely naturalistic landscape that brought the benefits of a healthful,
rural environment to urban dwellers. Exposure to this type of environment,
they believed, would provide needed rest to the urban elite and social and
moral uplift to the lower classes. Monumental buildings and imposing stat-
uary had no place in this idealized rural landscape. Even as construction of
the park began, however, other voices emerged to argue that inspiring parks
needed exactly the types of monumental structures the Olmsted-Vaux
design banned. Parks, they argued, should have grand ceremonial entrances
and house museums and other educational institutions. By the end of the
nineteenth century, still others argued that while the passive forms of recre-
ation offered in the Olmsted-Vaux vision had value, city dwellers, especially
those of the working class, needed more vigorous recreation. Baseball and
other types of organized sports would not only promote health and fitness,
but also teach important values, such as fair play and teamwork. 6
The transformative results of these debates can be seen in the history of
Central Park. When the park first opened, both its design and its location on
the edge of the city dictated that it would be used primarily by the city's
elites. Though, as noted, certain individuals pushed for inclusion of monu-
mental structures and other elements not in keeping with the Olmsted-Vaux
vision, for the most part, the park initially reflected the original naturalistic
design. Over time, however, the park became more accessible to a greater
cross section of the city's population, and later generations of patrons
pushed for new facilities. Gradually the park came to include such amenities
as baseball diamonds, restaurants, museums, and a zoo. It also changed to
accommodate the automobile?
178 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

Active recreation represented perhaps the most significant point in the

ongoing debate over parks in the first third of the twentieth century. In
1928 the Playground and Recreation Association of America and the
American Institute of Park Executives published the results of a major sur-
vey of urban parks. Directed by L. H.Weir, a leader in the urban recreation
movement, the study began with a survey of park history, which asserted
that the rise of the recreation movement had produced a new definition of
the urban park. Weir noted that in the 1850s leaders of the park movement,
especially Olmsted, had defined parks as places designed to evoke a rural
landscape in which city dwellers could enjoy the quiet contemplation of
nature-passive recreation. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and
progressing during the first quarter of the twentieth, however, many differ-
ent types of urban open spaces came to be called parks. These included
"plazas, squares, ovals, triangles, places, monument sites, promenades, and
public gardens" as well as areas dedicated to active recreation, such as golf
courses and baseball diamonds. Many parks originally designed according
to the Olmsted-Vaux model gradually came to incorporate athletic fields,
stadiums, playgrounds, and swimming pools. Weir noted that controversy
had often accompanied these changes, but, while acknowledging the value
of the ideas of the original park planners, he argued that "the life needs of
people which can be expressed in their leisure are far wider than those com-
prehended in the early conception, and a wide range of active forms of
recreation have come to be included." As a result, he concluded, by the late
1920s the term "park" had "come to mean any area of land or water set
aside for outdoor recreational purposes, whether it be recreation of a pas-
sive or active nature or any of the degrees between those two extremes.,,81t
was in the context of this broadened definition that early aviation enthusi-
asts argued for a connection between airports and parks. Like automobiles,
airplanes should also be welcomed into the garden.

Aviation's Early Decades

Early airports were very simple affairs, consisting primarily of large, open,
flat, grassy areas. Some had a hangar built along one edge of the field. There
were no runways per se, as most fields allowed for all-direction landing.
Some did have landing strips, areas where the turf was marked for takeoff
and landing, but prepared or paved runways did not appear until the late
1920s. Some airfields had radios and/or telephone service, and those used
by the post office gradually acquired lighting. Still, the untrained eye might
have had difficulty spotting an airport from the air in the 1920s.
Through most of that decade, aviation remained in many ways a recre-
ational activity. Before the passage of the Air Mail Act of 1925 and the Air
Commerce Act of 1926 (the former handing over delivery of airmail to
private carriers and the latter establishing regulations for the safe operation
of airlines), commercial airlines were not firmly established in the United
States. 9 Most people encountered aviation through barnstormers, air racers,
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 179

or airmail pilots. Military flying also existed, but its public impact was
limited and military pilots attracted most attention when participating in air
races or various types of long-distance demonstration flights. Barnstormers,
on the other hand, traveled the nation thrilling crowds with stunt flying and
carrying the adventuresome aloft. Especially in the early 1920s and then
again in the 1930s, air races drew huge crowds. The early airmail pilots,
pioneering the transcontinental airmail route, emerged as popular heroes.
Aviation at this time was largely spectacle, and airport crowds resembled
those at the football games and boxing matches so popular in the 1920s. 10
A 1930 Harvard University study indicated how many people visited
airports "on an ordinary day in summer" and "on a week-end in summer."
The figures were impressive. A number of cities, including Dallas,
Indianapolis, Louisville, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, reported that ten
thousand or more people visited their airports on summer weekends.
Dallas's Love Field hosted fifteen to twenty-five thousand on weekends and
as many as two thousand "on an ordinary summer day." Yet Dallas
reported only six airline arrivals and six departures daily on an average.
Obviously, the vast majority of the people visiting the airport were not there
as commercial airline passengers. They came because airports and airplanes
entertained them (figure 8.1).H

Figure 8.1 Charles A. Lindbergh adjusting parachute before testing an experimental airplane,
Lambert-St. Louis field, 1925.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.
180 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

The park-airport connection also appeared in contemporary city plan-

ning documents. The 1929 regional plan for New York City and environs,
for example, called for the acquisition of six primary airport sites identified
by the Hoover Commission and supported the acquisition of ten additional
sites. 12 These recommendations appeared in the part of the plan dedicated
to development of open spaces, including country clubs, military reservations,
water supply reservations, and public parks as well as airports. The New
York planners suggested that parts of the sites acquired for airports could,
perhaps, also be used as recreational areas. Further, they noted that sites pur-
chased for airports could be used as parks unless and until they were needed.
The planners thus saw airports and parks---or at least recreational open
space-as complementary and, to an extent, even interchangeable, though they
did recognize the difficulties posed by such dual use.13
Further complicating the picture was the fact that airports began to turn
to other sorts of recreation-swimming pools, picnic areas, even amusement
rides-to generate income. Although managers often looked askance at
these uses of the property, airports had trouble operating on a paying basis
and needed other sources of income.14

Figure 8.2 Washinton-Hoover Airport, looking northeast to the 14th Street Bridge, July
1932. After merging with the nearby Hoover Field in 1930, Washington-Hoover Airport was
the first major terminal to be developed in the greater Washington, DC area. The Washington-
Hoover Airport site is now part of the property of the Pentagon building.
Source: Historic American Buildings SurveyIHistoric American Engineering Record, Library of Congress.
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 18 I

The practice of equating airports and parks sparked a sometimes heated

debate in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Harvard University airport
study noted that of the forty-seven airports it surveyed, parks departments
operated ten, the same number operated by departments of public works.
The study's authors tentatively agreed that there were similarities between
airport management and park management. Both parks and airports
required "a large tract of land [that] must be cleared, graded, drained, sur-
faced, and landscaped. Structures must be erected and concessions leased or
operated, and provisions must be made for the handling of large crowds."
Despite the similarities, the report's authors concluded that if airports were
to be administered by existing departments of city governments, it was more
logical for them to fall under departments of public works, but they quali-
fied their conclusion with the caveat that the decision was "subject of course
to special local conditions. "15
The debate played out more pointedly in the pages of the journal City
Planning. In January 1930, City Planning reprinted a speech by Ulysses S.
Grant III, director of public buildings and public parks of the national cap-
ital, who argued that parks departments were best qualified to develop and
manage airports. Grant's speech drew responses in subsequent issues, some
favorable but most opposed to his position. L. H. Weir of the Playground
and Recreation Association of America, who in that organization's 1928
study had otherwise supported a broadened definition of parks, was among
the critics. Countering the argument that park administrators should
respond to the airplane as they had to the automobile, Weir noted that when
automobiles were few in number and used largely for purely recreational
purposes park administrators had indeed acted to improve existing carriage
drives for automobile use. However, once automobiles became a common
form of daily transportation, those same administrators began to restrict
their use. In the end, while parks departments had provided some early
roadways, they had not retained responsibility for the further development
of roads and highways. Similarly, although parks had been used as early
airfields and some, perhaps, were suitable places for emergency landings, if
the airplane was going to become another common form of transportation,
it did not make sense for airports to fall under the purview of parks
departments. 16
Gilmore D. Clarke, a landscape architect, and John Nolen, a leading city
planner, also wrote to reject the notion that airports should be managed by
parks departments, arguing that airports were transportation facilities, not
recreational facilities. The editorial board of City Planning dismissed the
idea as well, also on the grounds that airports were transportation facilities
and individuals with expertise in aviation and transportation should man-
age them. Basically, Clarke, Nolen, and City Planning all concluded that
parks and airports were not compatible land usesY
In September 1930, Clarence M. Young, the assistant secretary of com-
merce for aeronautics, weighed in on the issue with an article in American
City. While noting that both parks and airports were "civic assets" and
182 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

"essential to a city's present or future well-being-regardless of immediate

tangible returns," Young argued that "airports are by no means in the same
category as municipal parks." He defined the latter as "mere pleasure centers"
while airports were "the very 'highway' terminals through which air travel
can flOW.,,18 Though others arguing against an airport-park connection
might have balked at Young's depiction of parks, they surely would have
agreed with his definition of airports. And while the future of aviation as a
technology was not yet certain, all these critics of the airport-park connection
clearly sided with those who anticipated the growth of commercial air
transportation.

The Wichita Case

Despite such critics, state legislatures enacted laws that in various ways
equated parks with airports. California passed legislation enabling cities
and counties to acquire and operate airports in 1927. Not only did the law
allow local governments to acquire land for airports, it also permitted them
to use previously acquired parkland for airports and explicitly defined an
airport as a legitimate park purpose. 19 In the same year, the Illinois legisla-
ture permitted local public park commissioners either to use land they
already had or to acquire additional land in order to establish simple land-
ing fields-that is, sites where airplanes could take off and land but where
they could not be stored, repaired, or fueled. In 1929, the state passed addi-
tionallegislation allowing parks departments in counties with populations
below five hundred thousand to acquire land for the purpose of maintaining
and operating airports. The Kentucky legislature in 1928 empowered urban
park commissions to use or acquire parkland for airports. In addition, the
Kentucky statute specified that the park commission was to set the rules and
regulations for any airport it established. And Wisconsin lawmakers in
1927 authorized county park commissions to use or acquire land for
airports. 2o
In terms of influence and precedent, the most important developments
occurred in Kansas. As early as 1921, that state passed legislation allowing
local governments to "acquire by purchase or lease and maintain a munici-
pal field for aviation purposes, and pay the expense of such purchase, lease
or maintenance out of the general funds of the city."21 A problem arose
when local aviation boosters in Wichita identified land outside the city
limits as the most likely site for a municipal airport. While the city had the
power to acquire land for an airport, it could not do so outside the city
limits. In 1927, the state legislature passed a law allowing local boards of
park commissioners to purchase land beyond city limits for use as parks.
The head of the Wichita parks board, L. W. Clapp, apparently an aviation
booster himself, declared that an airport could be part of the city's park
system. He and the board prepared to move forward on the purchase. The
city government, however, opposed the move, and filed a suit against Clapp
in a case eventually decided by the Kansas Supreme Court. 22
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 183

In 1928, the court, in an opinion widely reported at the time and

frequently cited afterward, not only upheld the legality of the proposed
actions of the Wichita Board of Park Commissioners, but also strongly
defended the idea that airports constituted a "proper and legitimate" use of
parkland. The court determined that "park purposes" had been broadly
defined as "race track, bridle trails, boating, waiting room for street cars,
baseball diamond, restaurants, museums, conservatories and many other
recreational and educational facilities." It declared that while an airport had
a commercial aspect, it also had "an important value as a recreation facility
similar to city parks, golf courses, equestrian trails, bathing beaches, etc.,
and it should be a municipal enterprise. "23 The following year, the Kansas
state legislature effectively endorsed the court's decision and gave jurisdiction
over airports to boards of park commissioners.24
In short, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, aviation boosters had plenty
of support in law for turning to local parks authorities to establish a municipal
airport, though critics of that approach did exist.

Omaha: Finding a Plausible Expedient

Omaha is a case in which aviation boosters exploited the city's authority to
purchase parkland to expedite the creation of a municipal airport,
something they were able to do because it was seen as plausible by both city
government and local courts. Coming in May 1925, Omaha's action
followed congressional passage of the Air Mail Act (known also as the Kelly
Act) that transferred airmail service from the post office to private compa-
nies, but came before any new airmail contracts had been awarded. It also
predated by two years the aviation mania that Charles Lindbergh's flight
across the Atlantic inspired. And it came well before government policies
and technological advances had made commercial passenger aviation much
more than the pioneering venture of a few enthusiasts. By convincing the
city to purchase parkland without putting the question to a popular vote,
civic leaders assured an immediate result despite uncertainty about the
extent of public support for aviation in general and a municipal airport in
particular. Omaha aviation boosters found city commissioners receptive to
the idea that aviation was recreation. And while they hoped to attract one
of the new airmail contractors expected to spring up in the wake of the Kelly
Act, their first concern was to build an airport for aviation events. Within a
short time, again for the sake of expediency, the city shifted responsibility
for developing the airfield from the parks department to the street cleaning
and maintenance department. Nonetheless, Omaha's municipal airport
began as parkland dedicated to aviation.
Like Wichita, Omaha could have acquired land for an airfield under
existing law. In 1921 the Nebraska state legislature passed legislation allow-
ing cities of the first or second class (meaning Omaha and Lincoln, the state
capital) to acquire land for airports and funding necessary improvements to
any such site. The law further authorized the sale of bonds to finance these
184 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

projects. 25 Despite that legislative authorization and funding, Omaha's first

airport came about due to private sector action. Members of the city's
Chamber of Commerce established the first public access airport on land
owned by another local civic organization. The privately financed AK-SAR-
BEN (Nebraska spelled backward) field, west of the city, provided a landing
area for the first post office airmail planes. By 1924, however, post office
officials had grown dissatisfied with the somewhat remote site. They moved
Omaha's airmail service to a military installation, Fort Crook, south of the
city in adjacent Sarpy County. Omaha's business leaders reacted negatively
to an action that effectively closed the original airport and shifted the city's
airmail service to a location not only outside the city, but also outside the
county. The following year a committee of local businessmen investigated a
number of potential new airport sites within the city limits. They settled on
a piece of land north of downtown, near Carter Lake Park. The next step
involved financing the purchase and improvement of the land. 26
The idea of purchasing an airport site using the city's power to acquire
parkland first arose at a meeting of the Aerial Transportation Committee
of the Omaha Chamber of Commerce.27 Spearheading the airport drive,
this group wanted to avoid a public election over issuing bonds to fund the
project. Whether the committee's primary concern was the delay such an
election would impose, as suggested in the minutes to the meeting, or a
lack of public support (which the razor-thin margin of victory in the even-
tual vote would confirm) is unclear.28 It is clear, however, that by the time
the Carter Lake site had been selected the group had determined to move
forward with convincing the city to purchase the tract as parkland. 29
Though two city commissioners, including the park commissioner, Joseph
Hummel, present at a meeting in February 1925, questioned whether the
city could legally acquire land for an airport as part of the park system, by
March 1925, a majority of the city commission, convinced of the legality
of the action, had passed the necessary ordinance. In a message to the
commission shortly before the vote, the members of the Aerial
Transportation Committee urged immediate action. Their message
reflected their own uncertainty over the future of aviation; it noted that
even if the Carter Lake site should eventually prove unsuitable for avia-
tion, the land could still be used as a park and would thus prove a good
investment. 3o
The city finalized the purchase of the airport site in August 1925.
Although some "friendly suits" by landowners remained pending, both the
city government and the Chamber of Commerce anticipated that the parks
department would soon begin the needed improvements. 31 Hummel,
defending the idea that the parks department would take responsibility for
the new field, told a local reporter, " 'Aviation is an activity, as golf, tennis,
baseball, horseshoes.' "32
He was not the only one to assert a link between aviation and recreation.
While those who pushed for the establishment of the airport anticipated its
use by the airmail service, they also envisioned it as a place to conduct grand
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 185

public events that would not only inspire a greater "airmindedness" among
Omahans, but also promote the city as a center of aviation activity. Over the
next two years, however, the link between airports and parks would collapse
locally, as Omaha's parks department failed to complete the airfield.
Work began in early 1926 and proceeded slowly throughout that first
year. Before the work was completed, members of the Chamber of
Commerce made plans to host an event to promote the new airport. In May
1926, Commander Richard Byrd announced that he had circled the North
Pole in a Fokker Trimotor piloted by Floyd Bennett. Following his return to
the United States, the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics
sponsored a national tour by Byrd and his plane, the Josephine Ford, that
arrived at Omaha's still-unfinished airport in October 1926. 33
But even as the tour landed in Omaha, the Chamber of Commerce was
coming to the conclusion that progress in developing the new airport was
unsatisfactory. Despite Hummel's support, the parks department proved
incapable of bringing about the necessary improvements to the airfield
quickly enough to satisfy aviation boosters. In October 1926, Chamber rep-
resentatives persuaded the city council to allow the street cleaning and
maintenance department under Dean Noyes to complete much of the
work-mainly grading, providing drainage, and removing tree stumps.34
Although the airport would remain under parks department jurisdiction for
another two years, Noyes and his department carried out the remaining
improvements to the grounds during that time.
The relationship between the airport and the parks department further
broke down over the issue of building a municipal hangar. In August 1926,
Hummel asked the city council for permission to hire an architect to draw
up plans for a municipally owned hangar. A certain note of urgency accom-
panied his request, as the post office planned to award the contract for air-
mail service on a route through Omaha within the following six months.
Chamber of Commerce officials wanted the new airfield to be ready to
become the city's airmail airport. 35 When the council approved hiring of an
architect to design the hangar, Hummel believed that he could build the
structure using parks department funds. In early February 1927, however,
the city attorney informed him that existing law did not permit the use of
park bond funds for that purpose. The Aerial Transportation Committee
then decided to seek an individual or organization to build a hangar using
private funds. 36 Though Hummel remained of the opinion that the city
ought to build the hangar and make it available to aviators in the same way
that the parks department's tourist camps were available to the public, later
that year members of the Omaha chapter of the American Legion came
forward and agreed to raise the money for the project. 3?
While efforts to bring airmail to Omaha continued during 1927, airport
supporters concentrated primarily on planning aviation events. Though the
airport still lacked a large municipal hangar, airport boosters decided to
dedicate the facility on Sunday, July 10, 1927, during a visit of the Ford
Reliability Tour, a contest supported by the Ford Motor Company to
186 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

promote the development of safer aircraft. Twenty-five thousand people

flocked to the airport to see the airplanes and witness the dedication
ceremony.38 The following month, Charles Lindbergh and the Iowa-born
aviator Clarence Chamberlin (who had flown with a passenger from New
York to Germany shortly after Lindbergh's epic flight to Paris) visited
Omaha amid great fanfare. Chamberlin arrived first, lending his support to
the American Legion's efforts to raise money for an airport hangar. Plans for
Lindbergh's visit two weeks later called for a parade, a public speech, and a
banquet. The Chamber hoped that both men would help inspire public
enthusiasm for the city's airport. And indeed, the American Legion's fund
drive, which had been foundering, concluded successfully in September 1927.
The long-awaited hangar was completed in April 1928. 39
By early 1928, after the parks department's difficulties in improving the
field and building a hangar, the Chamber and the city council were ready to
turn responsibility for the airport over to the streets department. Even
though a local court had settled a suit challenging the city's use of parkland
for the airport in the city's favor, on March 13, 1928, the council formally
transferred responsibility for the airfield. 40
Airmail service returned to the city of Omaha proper in November 1930,
when Boeing Air Transport moved its operations from the field at Fort
Crook to its new hangar at the municipal airport. 41 By then travel by air was
growing, despite the onset of the Great Depression, and a future in which
airline service would be important began to seem probable. When the city
turned responsibility for the airport over to the streets department, it also
created an airport commission to oversee aviation activities. 42 Severing the
link in Omaha between the parks department and the airport was primarily
a response to specific local conditions, particularly the failure of the parks
department to expeditiously develop the airport, and not a rejection of
aviation as a recreational activity. Local aviation boosters continued to pro-
mote popular aviation events, such as the National Air Races held in May
1931 at the municipal airport.

Minneapolis: A Parks Commission Success Story

Minneapolis was another case in which using the parks commission to
develop and manage an airfield was an expedient strategy, but there it proved
not only plausible but also workable, and the parks commission operated the
Minneapolis municipal airport from June 1928 until August 1944. Though
use of the airport by commercial airlines grew during the 1930s, recreational
or leisure uses remained prominent through the mid-1930s. By late in the
decade, however, the complexity and expense of airport management and
development had pushed the Board of Park Commissioners in the direction
of turning the facility over to an airport commission.
The acreage that would form the heart of Minneapolis's municipal air-
port first came to the attention of many in the area as the Twin City Motor
Speedway, established in 1915 by a number of prominent citizens from
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 187

Minneapolis and St. Paul on land adjacent to Fort Snelling. Seeking to dupli-
cate the success of the racetrack at Indianapolis, the speedway hosted its
first SOO-mile race on September 4, 1915. Additional races were held in July
1916 and 1917. But the track never became a financial success, and the cor-
poration organized to manage it soon went bankrupt. After World War I,
the head of the Minnesota National Guard approached the state govern-
ment about establishing an air squadron. In the course of those discussions,
the Aero Club of Minneapolis suggested the site of the old speedway as a
possible location for an airfield. At the time, the land belonged to the
Snelling Field Corporation. 43
The following year, a number of Minneapolis and St. Paul businessmen,
many of whom were also members of the Aero Club, formed the Twin City
Aero Corporation to lease the land from the Snelling Field Corporation and
prepare the area as a landing field. In May 1920, the post office announced
that it would inaugurate airmail service to the Twin Cities in July "if the landing
field and hangar were ready." Local businessmen soon raised the necessary
funds and the hangar was in place when the first airmail plane arrived on
August 20, 1920.While the arrival of the airmail certainly was a highlight,
the day also included a flying circus and "a double parachute jump by
Charles (Speed) Holman."44
The post office suspended airmail service at the end of June 1921, and
military and more event-oriented aviation activities would dominate airfield
use until service resumed in July 1926. 45 In July 1921 the state appropriated
forty-five thousand dollars to build a hangar for the 109th Observation
Squadron, part of the 34th Division Aviation of the state militia. Perhaps
reflecting the predominance of military uses, in 1923 the field was renamed
Wold-Chamberlain Field-Twin City Air Port, in honor of two local mili-
tary aviators, Ernest G. Wold and Cyrus Foss Chamberlain, who had died
during World War 1.46 In terms of the airport's recreational value, it "was
much like many other flying fields that sprang into use throughout the coun-
tryside during that period," where "[o]ccasionally noted fliers from various
parts of the country would drop in. "47
Until 1926, the airport had been a joint venture, involving business lead-
ers from both Minneapolis and St. Paul. In that year, however, the St. Paul
interests sought to establish an airport nearer by, and by November 1926
the city had opened a new airfield in West St. Paul, across the Mississippi
River. Business and civic leaders in Minneapolis now began to explore how
they might make the existing field Minneapolis's municipal airport. In June
1926 two city aldermen approached the Board of Park Commissioners and
asked if it would be interested in purchasing and operating the airport. The
parks commission was the only municipal agency with the power to pur-
chase land outside the corporate limits of Minneapolis. The Twin City Aero
Corporation offered to sell the field for $126,000, and at the end of
November 1926 the Board of Park Commissioners asked the city's Board of
Estimate and Taxation to authorize the issuance of $150,000 in bonds to
support the purchase. 48
188 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

In early 1927, the State of Minnesota passed legislation permitting city

councils or boards of park commissioners in cities of the first class
(Minneapolis and St. Paul) to acquire property for and to equip airports.
The law limited the amount of bonds that could be issued for such a purpose
to $150,000. 49 The connection between the actions taken by the
Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners in late 1926 and the actions of
the state legislature in early 1927 is unclear. Though it seemed to endorse the
board's action, in fact the new legislation had raised a question: would the
city councilor the board purchase and build the airport? In April the board
notified the city council that it still planned to purchase the airport site, but
noted that if the council planned to act under the new legislation the situation
would change. The board received the go-ahead for its plans the following
month when the council passed a resolution to leave the matter of the airport
entirely in the hands of the park commissioners.5o
The council resolution came shortly after Lindbergh's flight, an event that
stirred great interest in aviation locally. In its wake, the Civic and Commerce
Association joined with a newly formed Minneapolis chapter of the
National Aeronautical Association to promote parks commission action on
the airport. By August 1, 1927, the private company that had been leasing
the airport from the Snelling Field Corporation was in default, and its lease
was cancelled. Two days later, the Board of Park Commissioners voted to
acquire the site. Its plans undoubtedly received a boost when, on August 23,
1927, Lindbergh landed there as part of his nationwide tour. It was months,
however, before the board and the Snelling Field Corporation came to terms
on a price and payment schedule to fit within the $150,000 bond limit and
finally completed the sale in August 1928. 51
Even before the parks commission took possession, military activity at
the field increased. In February 1927, Ninth Naval Air District officials
announced plans to establish an aviation squadron. A group of local busi-
nessmen calling themselves the Minneapolis Committee of One Hundred
built a hangar for the new squadron, but gave title to the Board of Park
Commissioners. The commissioners in turn agreed to lease the new hangar
to the navy for one dollar per year. Thus, when the parks commission took
over the field, it had the airmail service hangar built by the Twin City Aero
Corporation, a small hangar leased by a local aircraft company, three addi-
tional hangars, and a building used by the National Guard's aviation unit.
By the end of the first year of operation, two more leased hangars had been
built, in addition to the naval reserve hangar. The remains of the old speedway
still encircled the field, effectively marking the boundaries of useable land. 52
Though military activities figured prominently at the field, so did more
recreational uses. Sightseeing flights and airplane-watching became popular
activities and remained so through the early 1930s. In their operations
report for 1929-1930, parks commissioners provided figures illustrating the
types of aviation activities at the field. The report noted 2,402 arriving and
2,757 departing passengers on scheduled flights in 1929. For 1930, the
numbers rose to 2,810 arriving and 3,148 departing. But they paled in
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 189

comparison to the number of people who came to the airport to take an

aerial tour of the city-14,890 in 1929. Although the number of sightseers
declined by half the following year to 7,042, those coming to the airport for
recreational flights still outnumbered airline passengers. Only in 1931 did
arriving and departing passengers (8,397 and 8,315, respectively) together
outnumber sightseers (11,752).53
The Airport News, founded to publicize activities at the airport, reported
that sightseeing, particularly at night, remained popular into the 1930s. In
May and June 1933, the paper noted, 1,146 people boarded aircraft for
nighttime tours of the city. Through the first six months of 1933, the total
stood at 8,227 for all sightseers, day and night. This was at a time when
depression conditions had worked to lower the number of scheduled airline
passengers to 5,773 for the first half of the year. 54 As late as 1936, when the
scheduled airlines enplaned 10,538 passengers, sightseeing operations
carried 38,964 people aloft. 55
People went out to the airport to see the city from the air, and they also
went just to see the airplanes. In May 1934, the Airport News noted that the
monthly operations reports submitted by the airport manager to the park
board indicated that 33,200 people had visited the airport in April 1934.
While some of these came to the field for flights of some kind, the vast
majority simply came to gaze at the airplanes. The September figures were
even more impressive, with 111,800 visitors reported. 56 The 1936 report
indicated that slightly over one million people had visited the airport during
that year. 57 Clearly, during the 1930s the airport provided not only trans-
portation, but also certain types of leisure or recreational opportunities for
the people of the Twin Cities.
The Board of Park Commissioners was aware of the debate swirling
around the use of parkland for airport purposes. Perhaps not surprisingly, it
came down solidly on the side of those who supported the connection
between parks and airports. Superintendent of Parks Theodore Wirth,
addressing a meeting of the American Institute of Park Executives in 1928,
outlined the reasons why, he felt, parks commissions or departments should
take responsibility for local airports. First, he cited the recent court decision
in favor of the Wichita parks department, agreeing with the court that "airports
serve recreational as well as commercial purposes, and the management of
such ports is therefore a proper function of park administration." Second, he
noted that parks departments either had land suitable for airport use or
could purchase such land. Whether he meant that parks departments could
purchase such land with or without specific legislative authorization is
unclear, but he certainly held that either existing or newly purchased park-
land could be used for an airport. He then noted that municipal airports
needed to be attractive, well-landscaped areas. This idea was current in the
contemporary literature on airports, and Wirth held that parks departments
were best qualified to make airport sites "attractive, sanitary, and servicea-
ble to a high degree, just as with any other part of the park system." Finally,
Wirth argued, an airport must serve the needs of the public. He noted that
190 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

parks departments were already organized to serve the public and thus
could add airports to their list of facilities operated in the public interest. 58
The board's annual report for 1929, covering the first year of airport
operations under its control, reflected Wirth's confidence in its ability to
operate the airport. In addition, it acknowledged both the recreational role
of the facility and its more utilitarian purpose as a transportation facility.
The board noted two competing ideas about the operation of an airport:
that an airport was a municipally owned or operated public utility and as
such should be operated at a profit "from the very beginning or within a
short period"; and that an airport was infrastructure provided to aid com-
merce and industry and as such should be paid for out of general taxation.
The board argued that the first view would lead to "excessive charges" that
would "retard, if not entirely prevent progress and operation of the port."
The second would lead to "absurdly low leaseholds" to corporations and
other tenants who "could well afford to pay a reasonable rent." Instead of
adopting either, the board took a middle path, declaring that cities had an
obligation to provide airports and that tenants should "pay a ground rental
at all times sufficient to meet the cost of operation, maintenance, and
administration." The board saw an airport as "self-sustaining."59
In fact, during its first year of operation the airport was self-sustaining,
taking in $15,468.94 while expending $14,134.30. But that would be the
only time under parks department management that the airport showed a
profit. The 1930 report took note of the changed fiscal reality and also
reflected a change in the philosophy of the board. No longer did it expect
the airport to be self-sustaining. Instead, the board came to the conclusion
"that the municipal airport should be subsidized in such a manner as to
allow charging what the traffic will bear, yet helping the proponents of this
newest method of transportation, air travel, to establish themselves." The
report reminded readers "that water and rail transportation was at first sub-
sidized directly by state and governmental aid" and that bus transportation
was presently being subsidized indirectly "by both state and federal aid in
the building of good roads.,,60
Despite the reversal of fortune, the Board of Park Commissioners contin-
ued to operate the airport throughout the 1930s, sponsoring and managing
a number of improvements funded by the Work Projects Administration. 61
As long as the two visions-recreational and utilitarian-remained compat-
ible and in rough balance, the park board saw no issues with its continued
management of the airport. By the late 1930s, however, the expense and
complexity of airport operations had grown, and the board began to look
for additional sources of funding and, eventually, an alternative management
structure.
In 1938, Congress passed the Civil Aeronautics Act that, among its many
provisions, called for a survey of airports with an eye to the development of
a federal plan for their improvement. In the wake of this legislation, the
United States Conference of Mayors sent a questionnaire to cities across the
country as part of an effort to lobby for a permanent program of federal aid
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 19 I

for airports. The Minneapolis park board responded with a lengthy argu-
ment in favor of federal aid that clearly indicated just how expensive and
difficult it had become to own and operate an airport.
While acknowledging that localities did gain from the presence of an
airport, the board endorsed the call "for a program of Federal aid to municipal
airports for the construction, improvement, development and expansion of
needed facilities." It went even further, arguing for funding for "the opera-
tion and maintenance of certain municipal airports." The board asserted
that the number of improvements required to keep an airport up-to-date
were simply too great to be supported by purely local resources. Although it
had carried out a number of "extensive improvements," the board still
found itself facing "a rather formidable list of desirable and even necessary
improvements," including an expanded administration building and more
concrete runways, taxiways, and aprons. Further, "the rules and regulations
promulgated by the Department of Commerce, which in themselves are
entirely justified for the safety and convenience of airplane operation, not
infrequently cause the municipality to go to considerable expense to comply
with such rules and regulations." The board also mentioned-as war
loomed-the amount of military activity at the airport. Military and other
federal government operations at the airport (weather bureau, Department
of Commerce, communication service) did not pay rents that matched
expenses, and that circumstance also served as "a strong argument for
additional government subsidies. "62
The argument for federal subsidies was not in itself an argument for the
board to give up management of the airport. However, by the late 1930s
the combination of acknowledged need for federal aid, increased use of the
airport for transportation purposes, and a desire to make the Minneapolis
airport "the major airport in the Northwest" did indeed point to a change
in ownership and operation. 63 An airport was no longer just a "suitable
tract of land, properly graded and equipped with ground, administration,
and safe operating facilities" as the 1929 report of the Board of Park
Commissioners described it. Instead, by 1940 the airport required the addi-
tion of 435 acres (more than doubling its size), the extension of runways to
5,000 feet, and "the construction of the necessary taxiways, drainage, light-
ing, fencing, etc." The board's 1940 report indicated that the needed
improvements involved moving over two million yards of earth and laying
down "approximately 200,000 square yards of concrete.,,64 The airport
was no longer simply another property belonging to the board, but its major
focus. As its 1940 report concluded, "In all likelihood the development of
the Minneapolis Municipal Airport during 1941 will constitute the major
improvement work of this Board."65
The changing view of the airport was undoubtedly reinforced by a study
headed by the board for the purpose of planning Minneapolis's postwar
aviation future. Published in 1943, this study focused entirely on what
would be required to position the city and its airport as an important part
of the national air transportation system. It looked at what would be needed
192 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

in terms of improvements to the existing airport and assessed sites for a pos-
sible second major airport in the area. The study clearly defined the airport
as a transportation facility. No mention was made of any recreational use or
purpose. 66
In light of these circumstances, the Board of Park Commissioners
endorsed passage of a state bill in 1943 that created the Minneapolis-St. Paul
Metropolitan Airports Commission. The new commission took over
management of the Minneapolis airport in August 1944. Former park
superintendent Theodore Wirth believed that this marked "the beginning of
a new era of aviation development for the metropolitan district." In this
new era, the transportation purpose of the airport would be central; Wirth
predicted that the Twin Cities would develop into "one of the great air
terminals of the United States." This was the same Theodore Wirth who in
1929 had emphasized the recreational nature of airports. By 1944 trans-
portation needs overwhelmingly predominated over the recreational, and
management of the airport needed to reflect that new reality.

Welcoming the Machine

Today commercial aviation is a mass experience, as millions of Americans
travel by air every year. In the 1920s and 1930s, aviation was a mass
phenomenon of a different sort, a recreational activity. Most people experi-
enced flying as spectators, not participants. As people debated the proper
use of the airplane during these decades, they also debated the definition of
an airport. Numerous actors, including parks advocates, local civic leaders,
and aviation professionals contributed to that conversation. As a result of
this and other debates, the definition of a park expanded to embrace a
number of new uses, including aviation. But the definition of an airport nar-
rowed to reflect primarily its transportation function. In consequence,
though airports continued to serve as venues for air shows and visits by
celebrity pilots, and as places to watch a fascinating example of modern
technology, by the 1940s their transportation functions overshadowed their
recreational uses. Both definitions, however, remained elastic enough for
airports to retain certain recreational functions and for parks and airports
to coexist at certain times and under certain circumstances.
While few today would think of an airport as a site for recreation, echoes
of this earlier period remain. Many airports still offer observation decks or
other areas where people can sit and watch so-called airside operations.
Both Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Baltimore/
Washington International Airport have adjacent park areas where people
can walk, picnic, and watch airplanes. The International Council of Air
Shows estimates that between fifteen and eighteen million people attend air
shows annually in North America. While military bases hosted a sizable per-
centage of the more than 260 air shows in 2004, the rest happened at the
nation's municipal airports. 67 And although the number of licensed pilots in
the United States has fallen by approximately two hundred thousand in the
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 193

last quarter-century, among the more than six hundred thousand who
remain are pilots who annually trek to the convention and air show at
Oshkosh, Wisconsin, home of the Experimental Aircraft Association, one of
the best attended aviation events in the nation, with a paid attendance, over
several days, of approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand. 68
And in at least one case, in marked contrast to Chicago, a new link
between parks and airports has been forged. County commissioners recently
purchased Van Sant Airport in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. With commis-
sioners noting that it already contained "many different kinds of parks,"
the nearly 200-acre facility with its grass runway is the newest addition to
the Bucks County park system. While the commissioners carefully
asserted the environmental value of preserving this "open space," local
users focused on the fact that it offered them an opportunity to have a picnic
and watch the vintage airplanes and gliders using the field. 69 Much as their
predecessors had in the 1920s and 1930s, the Bucks County commissioners
have welcomed the flying machine into one of their gardens.

Notes
Dr. Bednarek is a professor of history at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. She
wishes to acknowledge the feedback and support provided by commentators, particularly
Mark Rose, when early versions of this article were presented at conferences organized by
the North Carolina First Flight Centennial Commission and the Society for American
City and Regional Planning History in 2001. The Office of the Dean, College of Arts and
Sciences, University of Dayton provided support for a second research trip to the state
archives in St. Paul, Minnesota. The comments of the Technology and Culture referees
were particularly helpful in identifying additional research sources and clarifying the
overall thesis.
1. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America (Oxford, 1964). On the influence of this work, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, "Leo
Marx's The Machine in the Garden," Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 147-59.
2. Cyril Stanley Smith, "Art, Technology, and Science: Notes on Their Historical
Interaction," Technology and Culture 11 (1970): 493-549.
3. Susan Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922 (Baltimore, 1987).
4. Dominick A. Pisano, "The Greatest Show Not on Earth: The Confrontation between
Utility and Entertainment in Aviation," in The Airplane in American Culture (Ann
Arbor, MI, 2003),39-74.
5. In the early 1980s, Galen Cranz published a study of park design in which she suggested
that the history of parks in the United States could be divided into four eras: 1850 to
1900; 1900 to 1930; 1930 to 1965; and post-1965. In each, she argued, a certain design
ideal emerged to shape park planning. While calling her typology "venturesome and
pioneering," Jon Peterson nonetheless offered a number of critiques, among them that
parks or open spaces in the United States predated 1850, that Cranz's time periods were
too rigid, and that she did not take sufficient account of variations in park design dur-
ing each period. Taken together, Cranz's work and Peterson's critique strongly suggest
that the uses and functions of parks have long been subject to debate. See Galen Cranz,
The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, MA,
1982), and Jon Peterson, "The Evolution of Public Open Space in American Cities,"
Journal of Urban History 12 (1985): 75-88.
194 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

6. For a discussion of the changing perceptions of the meaning of parkland, see David
Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-
Century America (Baltimore, MD, 1986),59-146.
7. See Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of
Central Park (New York, 1994), 1-11.
8. L. H. Weir, ed., Parks: A Manual of Municipal and County Parks, vol. 1 (New York,
1928), xix-xxi.
9. For a sense of early airline history in the United States, the small-scale and often tem-
porary nature of the earliest airlines, and the importance of the Air Mail Act of 1925
in establishing the foundation of U.S. commercial aviation, see R. E. G. Davies,
Airlines of the United States since 1914 (Washington, DC, 1972), 1-15, 31-55.
10. On barnstormers, air racers, and the early airmail pilots, see Roger E. Bilstein, Flight
in America: From the Wrights to the Astronauts, 3rd ed. (Baltimore, 2001),60-62;
Terry Gwynn-Jones, Farther and Faster: Aviation's Adventuring Years, 1909-1939
(Washington, DC, 1991), 103-276; William M. Leary, Aerial Pioneers: The U.S. Air
Mail Service, 1918-1927 (Washington, DC, 1985).
11. Henry V. Hubbard et aI., Airports: Their Location, Administration and Legal Basis
(Cambridge, MA, 1930), 146-48.
12. For a discussion of the Hoover Commission's role in identifying possible airport sites in
the New York metropolitan area, see David A. Johnson, Planning the Great Metropolis:
The 1929 Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (London, 1996), 166.
13. Committee on the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, The Graphic
Regional Plan: Atlas and Description, Regional Plan, vol. 1 (New York, 1929),
336-75.
14. For examples of discussions concerning recreationaUamusement activities at air-
ports, see Stratton Coyner, "The Job of the Airport Manager," American City 42
(March 1930): 126-28; Major C. C. Mosely, "Hitch Your Airport to the Stars,"
Aviation 34 (November 1935): 16-18; William D. Strohmeier, "More Fun at the
Airport," Aviation 39 (November 1940): 38-39.
15. Hubbard et aI., Airports, 57-58, 169. The study also listed airports "built on park
lands." In addition to those in the ten cities with airports controlled by parks depart-
ments, seven other cities had airports built on parkland. Hubbard, 166.
16. Lieutenant Colonel U.S. Grant III, "Airports and Public Parks," City Planning 6
(January 1930): 33-34; L. H. Weir, "The Airport as Transportation Terminal," City
Planning 6 (April 1930): 119-20.
17. Gilmore D. Clarke, "The Airport Is Specialized Commercial Space," City Planning 6
(April 1930): 123-24; John Nolen, "Under What Jurisdiction Public Airports Should
Be Placed?" City Planning 6 (April 1930): 125-27; "Editorial: Airports," City
Planning 6 (January 1930): 28-29.
18. Clarence M. Young, "Aeronautics and the Municipality," American City 43
(September 1930): 119.
19. Arnold Knauth et aI., 1928 United States Aviation Reports (Baltimore, 1928),450-51.
Published yearly beginning in 1928, the volumes in this series contain reprints of court
decisions, state laws, and federal laws and regulations concerning aviation.
20. Ibid., 483, 502-3, 577-78; Ibid., 1929 United States Aviation Reports (Baltimore,
MD, 1929), 524-25.
21. Knauth et aI., 1928 United States Aviation Reports, 495.
22. J. E. Cravey, "Wichita Comes Through," Airports 6 (October 1928): 27-28.
23. Knauth et aI., 1928 United States Aviation Reports, 8-16.
24. Ibid., 1929 United States Aviation Reports, 565-66.
25. Ibid., 1928 United States Aviation Reports (n. 19 above), 545.
26. Leslie R. Valentine, "The Development of the Omaha Municipal Airfield,
1924-1930" (Master's thesis, University of Nebraska, Omaha, 1980), 18-21.
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 195

27. Minutes of the Meeting of the Aerial Transportation Committee, Omaha Chamber
of Commerce, July 28, 1924, Special Collections, University Library, University of
Nebraska, Omaha (hereafter UNO Special Collections), 27.
28. The city finally held a special airport bond election in October 1928. An analysis of
the extremely close vote indicated that voters in working-class wards in the northern
and southern sections of the city voted against the measure, while voters in the more
affluent western wards voted in favor of the measure. The measure actually failed to
pass on election day, but once the absentee ballots were counted it had a margin of
155 votes, 37, 314 to 37,159. Valentine, 48-61.
29. Minutes of the Meeting of the Aerial Transportation Committee, Omaha Chamber
of Commerce, January 15, 1925, UNO Special Collections, 54.
30. Minutes of the Aerial Transportation Committee, Omaha Chamber of Commerce,
March 23, 1925, UNO Special Collections, 58-59.
31. "Omaha Muny Air Field is Assured," Omaha Chamber of Commerce Journal 14,
no. 8 (August 15, 1925): 5.
32. Quoted in "Muny Air Field for Omaha Is Approved by Council; Friendly Suits
Planned," Omaha Morning Bee, August 6, 1925.
33. "Working for Omaha's Interests in Aviation," Omaha Chamber of Commerce
Journal 15, no. 13 (October 23, 1926): 1.
34. Valentine, "The Development," 34-35.
35. Minutes of the Meeting of the Aerial Transportation Committee, Omaha Chamber
of Commerce, September 30,1926, UNO Special Collections, 55.
36. Minutes of the Meeting of the Aerial Transportation Committee, Omaha Chamber
of Commerce, February 4, 1927, UNO Special Collections, 20.
37. Minutes of the Meeting of the Aerial Transportation Committee, Omaha Chamber of
Commerce, February 11, 1927, UNO Special Collections, 22; "Legion Works for Air
Field Hangar," Omaha Chamber of Commerce Journal 16, no. 7 (July 30, 1927): 5.
38. "'Aviation Day' to Be Gala Event," Omaha Chamber of Commerce Journal 16, no. 5
(July 2, 1927): 4; "Omaha Dedicates New Municipal Air Field," Omaha Chamber
of Commerce Journal 16, no. 6 (July 16, 1927): 1.
39. "Aviation of Prime Interest Now in Omaha," Omaha Chamber of Commerce Journal
16, no. 9 (August 27,1927): 1; "Airport Corporation Organizes," Omaha Chamber
of Commerce Journal 16, no. 11 (September 24, 1927): 10; "Aviation Needs in
Omaha," Omaha Chamber of Commerce Journal 16, no. 24 (March 1928): 4.
40. Minutes of the Meeting of the Aerial Transportation Committee, Omaha Chamber of
Commerce, January 6,1928, UNO Special Collections, 9; Valentine (n. 26 above), 69.
41. Valentine, "The Development," 158-59.
42. City of Omaha, Ordinance 13508, June 19, 1928, copy in City of Omaha Recorder's
Office, City-County Building, Omaha. That ordinance was soon replaced by a more
detailed one; see City of Omaha, Ordinance No. 13581, December 26,1928, City of
Omaha Recorder's Office, City-County Building, Omaha.
43. Theodore Wirth, "Retrospective Glimpses into the History of the Board of Park
Commissioners of Minneapolis, Minnesota and the City's Park, Parkway and
Playground System," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Board of Park
Commissioners, July 16, 1945, 383, 386-87, typescript, Sidney Stolte Collection,
Minnesota Work Projects Administration Materials, 1935-1942, P2555, box 1,
Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul (hereafter MHS).
44. Ibid., 387-89.
45. The airmail service came under fire for its high costs following the 1920 elections,
and the post office decided to focus primarily on the transcontinental airmail route.
It had experimented with feeder routes, such as the one to Minneapolis, but when
these failed to garner enough business to justify their existence the service was
withdrawn. See Leary (n. 10 above), 145-54.
196 Janet R. Daly Bednarek

46. "Short History of the Minneapolis Municipal Airport (Wold-Chamberlain Field) and
Memorandum of the Principal Official Transactions from Its Inception up to the
Present Time," January 25,1930,1, typescript, Manuscript Notebook, Minneapolis
(MN) Board of Park Commissioners, PI189-19, MHS.
47. Ibid., 389.
48. Wirth, "Retrospective Glimpses," 389-90.
49. H. F. No. 1387, "A Bill for an act relating to public airports, providing for the
organization and administration of public corporations for acquiring, establishing,
developing, maintaining, controlling, and operating such airports, and for financing
the operations of such corporations, and those of other municipalities owning and oper-
ating airports, and appropriating moneys therefore," chap. 500, approved April 19,
1943; copy of text of bill in MHS.
50. Wirth, "Retrospective Glimpses," 389-90.
51. Ibid., 390-91.
52. Ibid., 392-94; "Short History of the Minneapolis Municipal Airport," 3-4.
53. Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners, Forty-Eighth Annual Report of the
Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners (Minneapolis, 1930), chart between 76
and 77, and Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners, Forty-Ninth Annual Report
of the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners (Minneapolis, MN, 1931), 60,
Minneapolis (MN) Board of Park Commissioners Collection, MHS.
54. "Night Sightseeing Flights Popular," Airport News, August 12, 1933, 1, 4.
55. Board of Park Commissioners, "Annual Operations Report, 1936," manuscript
notebook, P1189-19, MHS.
56. "Thousands of Visitors at Minneapolis Airport during Month of April," Airport
News, May 15, 1934, 3; "900 Air Passengers Arrive at Minneapolis in Month,"
Airport News, October 26, 1934, 1.
57. Board of Park Commissioners, "Annual Operations Report, 1936."
58. Wirth, "Retrospective Glimpses," 396; "Who Shall Own and Operate the
Airports?" American City 39 (December 1928): 110. For examples of calls to land-
scape and beautify airport property, see George B. Ford, "Location, Size, and Layout
of Airports," American City 37 (September 1927): 301-3; O. J. Swander,
"Exceptional Site, Landscaping, Lighting, and Buildings Characterize Wichita
Airport," American City 44 (April 1931): 109-10.
59. Board of Park Commissioners, Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Minneapolis
Board of Park Commissioners (Minneapolis, MN, 1929), 62, Minneapolis (MA)
Board of Park Commissioners Collection, MHS.
60. Board of Park Commissioners, Forty-Eighth Annual Report of the Minneapolis
Board of Park Commissioners (Minneapolis, MN, 1930), 70, Minneapolis (MN)
Board of Park Commissioners Collection, MHS.
61. For a sense of the public works projects completed at Wold-Chamberlain Field, see
Board of Park Commissioners, "The Story of W. P. A. in the Minneapolis Parks,
Parkways and Playgrounds for 1941," 10-27, typescript, Sidney Stolte Collection,
Minnesota Work Projects Administration Materials, 1935-1942, P2555, box 1, MHS.
62. Wirth, "Retrospective Glimpses ," 407-9.
63. Board of Park Commissioners, Fifty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Park
Commissioners, Minneapolis, Minnesota (Minneapolis, 1940), 64, Minneapolis
(MN) Board of Park Commissioners Collection, MHS.
64. Ibid., 64-66.
65. Ibid., 66.
66. See Board of Park Commissioners, "A Study of Air Terminal Facilities of
Minneapolis (March 17, 1943)," MHS.
 The Flying Machine in the Garden 197

67. For general information on air shows in North America and precise figures on military
bases and municipal airports hosting air shows in 2004, see the website of the
International Council of Air shows, http;//www.airshows.org, accessed June 16, 2004.
68. For a discussion of the decline in the number of active pilots in the United States and of
efforts to reverse that trend, see Janet R. Daly Bednarek and Michael H. Bednarek,
Dreams of Flight: General Aviation in the United States (College Station, TX, 2003),
124-26. For a history of the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual convention,
including attendance figures, see http;// www.airventure.orgl2004/ about! history.html,
accessed June 16,2004.
69. Brian Callaway, "It's Just a Flight in the Park," Intelligencer, September 8, 2003;
http;//www.avweb.com/eletterlarchives/avflashl126-full.html# 185665, accessed
September 11, 2003.
 Chapter 9

Miscegenation and Competing Definitions of

Race in Twentieth-Century Louisiana

Michelle Brattain

From The Journal of Southern History

Marcus Bruce Christian, an author and professor at Dillard University,

observed in the mid-nineteen-fifties that while New Orleans might be known
for "gumbo, jambalaya, lagniappe, poor boy sandwiches, pralines, Mardi
Gras and Creoles," it also has "another claim to distinction which has not
been bruited about very loudly." New Orleans is a place, he wrote, where
family lines "waver back and forth across color-lines like wet wash in a high
March wind." The city has given to America "more 'passer pour blanches'
[people who pass for white1than any other city in our country." A poet and
scholar of black history, Christian anticipated much of the current academic
interest in race as a social construction. 1 His meticulous histories of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century families recreated an era when racial lines
were more fluid and southern society accepted--{)r at least expected-
interracial sex. In the latter half of Christian's career, as a civil rights struggle
charged with anxieties about interracial contact swirled around him, his inter-
ests broadened to include the progeny of those early families. Among thou-
sands of newspaper clippings that Christian saved over his lifetime-
documenting New Orleans history from the protracted fight over school
desegregation to the debate over stereotypical and degrading representations
of Mricans in Mardi Gras-one finds dozens of society photographs,
wedding announcements, and obituaries that he compiled, seemingly in an
attempt to discover a similar secret interracial history of the twentieth century.
In the margins, he sometimes annotated genealogies, alternate spellings, or
anecdotes about similar names encountered on the other side of the color line.
In 1959, for example, he noted, and documented, the strange coincidence of
a death notice for a man he thought was a "Negro," who had died at an "all
white" hospital, and speculated on the dead man's familial relationship to a
realtor listing a "colored" apartment a couple of weeks later. Of the family
200 Michelle Brattain

name in question, he later wrote to himself, "Joubert? What about the white
family that says it spells its name 1au' and not 1ou'[?]" Christian often wrote
simply, as he did on a 1960 photograph of a couple cutting their fiftieth-
anniversary cake, the word miscegenation. 2 The basis for such judgments was
rarely explained. Perhaps it was a distant memory, a rumor, or merely
Christian asserting his ability as a black man to spot passer pour blanches.
Unfortunately he never published his side of these stories.
For the historian who seeks to discover the secret history of the race line in
the twentieth century, the record is both as suggestive and as cryptic as
Marcus Christian's handwritten notes. Though interracial marriage had been
illegal in Louisiana since the eighteenth century, it was common knowledge
that few families could claim "pure" lineage from any group.3 Louisianans
had a saying in Christian's day that "You can take a bowl of rice and feed all
the people of pure-white blood in the city." Local lore also celebrated, from
the safe distance of the twentieth century, an exotic past of interracial
romance symbolized by the legendary antebellum "quadroon balls." Though
white Louisiana revered its cosmopolitan and interracial roots in Spanish,
French, Caribbean, and Mrican cultures, it had long ago confined such rever-
ence to memory, adopting a more rigid, binary notion of black and white and
the corresponding practices of American segregation. In the twentieth cen-
tury, the law and racial etiquette absolutely prohibited amorous relationships
across the color line. Yet scattered evidence, from anecdotes about "passing"
to occasional newspaper reports of arrests on miscegenation charges, lends
credence to Christian's hunches about the persistence of interracial relation-
ships. Moreover, whites' concern about "race mixing," the purity of one's lin-
eage, and the maintenance of segregation-in other words, too many whites
protesting a little too much-provides grounds for suspecting the existence of
significant cracks in racial solidarity. The leaders of Louisiana's White
Citizens' Council, for example, frequently proclaimed that miscegenation was
the secret, invidious, un-American goal of both the integrationists and the
communists.4 The state's laws formulated increasingly strict definitions of
miscegenation and imposed ever-harsher penalties over the course of the first
half of the twentieth century. By the 1950s the maximum punishment for a
criminal conviction for interracial sex was five years in prison with or without
hard labor. 5 The intensity of white anxiety in the twentieth century makes
surviving traces of interracial contact more remarkable and compelling.
The realm of law was one of the few venues in which such private rela-
tionships became public. Miscegenation law and jurisprudence offer a
unique, if somewhat problematic, view of a whole constellation of ideas that
twentieth-century Louisianans associated with race. Although court cases
permit only a limited view of actors in an artificially controlled context,
recent scholarship has demonstrated the rich possibility that legal history
affords for providing insight into the construction of race in the United
States. An autonomous discourse in its own right, as Eva Saks has argued,
miscegenation law consisted of an evolving, self-referential body of ideas
and actions that acquired a power of its own, enabling it to create and
 Miscegenation 20 I

sustain ideas such as the notion that race is, and resides in, "blood."6 These
statutes and cases also played a paramount role in shaping the legal status
of race and racial identity, contributing to a deeply racialized but ostensibly
"color blind" jurisprudence based on what Peggy Pascoe has described as a
"new modernist racial ideology."? Moreover, the law is a matchless arena
for witnessing the absurdities of racial belief and the "logic" of racial
practice laid out plainly and unapologetically for the historical record.
This essay will focus on racial laws and four major case studies (only one
of which is a criminal prosecution) from twentieth-century Louisiana in
order to probe the meaning of race and miscegenation for one segregated
but irrefutably interracial society in the Jim Crow South. 8 The analysis is
based primarily on court records, including testimony, briefs, and exhibits,
as well as the judicial decisions and reasoning behind the resolution of each
case. In spite of their limitations, these records represent a site where private
relations were momentarily exposed and the indeterminate nature of race
was often candidly admitted. 9 The courts themselves created a space where
people expressed their unofficial "working" definitions of race, providing a
fascinating insight into the adaptations of people who lived with the inde-
terminacy of race yet continued to believe in some essential meaning of the
concept. Legal records also permit an examination of the construction of
race at the legislative and judicial levels, the use of gender and sexuality in
attempts to police the race lines, and, more generally, the evolution of ideas
about what race meant in the mid-twentieth-century South.
Two striking conclusions emerge from an analysis of these records. First,
Louisianans held much more complicated and historically contingent views of
race than the statutes and court decisions alone would suggest. The legal adju-
dication of race in the twentieth century, as Pascoe has argued, historically
had a complex, interdependent relationship with popular and scientific beliefs
about race. This essay examines one aspect of that tension. By necessity, poli-
tics and the courts represented abstract law that could recognize only black
and white, but the people who entered the courts worked with a more practi-
cal understanding that was also born of necessity. Most noteworthy about the
testimony of people brought into Louisiana courts by miscegenation law is
the fluidity and contextual nuance with which many people viewed race. In
spite of the mid-twentieth century's increasingly rigid lines of demarcation
with regard to race, many ordinary Louisiana citizens instinctively under-
stood and accepted the essentially social nature of racial definitions, and they
worked with these definitions in the most private areas of their lives.
Second, though miscegenation law frequently failed to prevent sex across
the race line, it served another equally significant function in the twentieth
century: a tool to monitor racial boundaries. Louisiana state law had often
been able to tame and contain the contradictions of black and white, but by the
mid-twentieth century, the demands of massive resistance increasingly brought
about more ideological and less practical applications of jurisprudence.
Official public records associated with essentially private and gendered actions
such as birth and marriage became a gatekeeping mechanism for maintaining
202 Michelle Brattain

segregation in Louisiana schools, sports, and public conveyances.

Government-employed bureaucrats carried out increasingly stringent investi-
gations of once-routine applications for marriage licenses, death certificates,
and birth certificates in order to police the boundaries of race and expose those
who in the past might have "passed" as white or married across race lines.
These private points of individual connection with the state, therefore, took on
a substantial burden in the maintenance of racial boundaries, the punishment
of miscegenation, and the defense of whiteness. The objective of antimisce-
genation law was ostensibly to discourage and punish sex across the race line,
but it also permitted the state to use gender and private life to control the same
boundary. In doing so, it made significant contributions to the redefinition of
miscegenation and race itself.
Incidents of "race mixture" and white attempts to control such encoun-
ters have a long and infamous history in the South. Although prohibition of
interracial sex was typically legislators' stated objective, recent scholarship
also underscores the deeply contextual nature of the statutes' various incar-
nations. In colonial Virginia, where the earliest legislation on interracial
liaisons appeared in 1662, the law reflected first the English conception of
broadly defined racial hierarchy and later the social and economic domi-
nance of explicitly racial slavery. At all times, colonial law addressed the
reality of ongoing racial mixing, even as it represented what A. Leon
Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff have aptly described as
"attempts to patch holes in the fabric of the system."lO
The solution, as Peter W. Bardaglio puts it, was a legal attempt "not so much
to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them" in directions that
bolstered the slave system and existing racial and gender hierarchies.u While
the specific definitions of the crime and punishment varied, as Charles
Robinson notes, "In each colony a violation of the law required some party,
man, woman, and/or child, to make restitution by sacrificing freedom."
Doubling the fine for interracial fornication, Virginia's assembly, for example,
declared in 1662 that an interracial child's status would follow that of the
mother. This ruling insured that the most common transgression of the color
line-between black women and white men-would not undermine a social
system increasingly based on a dichotomy between black slaves and free white
persons. Maryland's 1664 antimiscegenation law did not proscribe marriage,
but it declared that a white woman who married a slave would serve that slave's
master for the remainder of the husband's life and that any offspring would be
required to labor for the parish for thirty-one years. Mer 1692 in Maryland
and 1725 in Pennsylvania, free black men who married white women were sen-
tenced to a lifetime of slavery. In the first half of the eighteenth century,
Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, and Georgia
enacted provisions similar to those of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. 12
Colonial officials also singled out white women who had sex with black men
for special punishment, a double standard that reflected, among other concerns,
a perceived need both to control white female sexuality and to eliminate the
threat that interracial offspring posed to the institution of slavery.13
 Miscegenation 203

Because statutes were created and enforced on a state-by-state basis, it is

difficult to generalize about American antimiscegenation law prior to
Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed
marriage regulations based on race. By the mid-nineteenth century, though,
twenty-one of thirty-four states had passed legislation to proscribe or limit
interracial sex. Most banned interracial marriage, but as Charles Robinson
and Peter Wallenstein demonstrate in their histories of antimiscegenation
law, the level of enforcement and specific penalties varied considerably, even
within the South. South Carolina, for example, forbade white women to
have children with nonwhite men, but it did not outlaw marriage between
them. Alabama and Mississippi, on the other hand, outlawed marriage, but
those states did not have an antebellum law prohibiting interracial sex. Only
Georgia and Florida explicitly banned interracial cohabitation. However, a
lack of specific antimiscegenation laws did not necessarily indicate state
lenience, as Robinson shows, for other states occasionally punished interra-
cial sex under adultery or fornication laws, particularly if the case involved
a public relationship between a white woman and a black manY
Collectively, because many state laws shared a concern with defining races,
the whole body of antimiscegenation law made important contributions to
the construction of race by establishing local, legal definitions of whiteness
and affirming the conception of blackness as an algebraic function of one's
"blood."15 A number of state legislatures decreed how much-one-fourth
or one-eighth-black ancestry or "blood" made a person legally blackY
Louisiana varied somewhat from the American and southern norms
because of its background as a French and Spanish colony. Louisianans his-
torically tolerated interracial unions and grudgingly acknowledged their
existence, but most of the state's residents did not condone such relation-
ships. French law, for example, did not initially prevent European settlers in
Louisiana from intermarrying or cohabiting with Indians, though French
authorities, fearing the material, social, and religious implications of race-
mixing (or metissage), attempted to stop the practice by promoting the
immigration of French women to be wivesY The French did introduce an
antimiscegenation law in 1724 with severe penalties for interracial sex, but
colonial authorities seldom enforced it. Spanish colonial officials, who took
control of the territory in 1769, found it equally difficult to prevent interra-
cial sex, even though prohibitions on marriage and on public sexual affairs
outside of marriage-known legally as "concubinage"-remained in place.
Indeed interracial unions occurred often enough that the French and the
Spanish legal systems recognized three distinct populations: Europeans, free
people of color, and slaves. When Louisiana became part of the United
States, some elements of this system persisted, as Louisiana outlawed
marriages between people from three, rather than two, groups: free people
of color, black slaves, and whites. However, American laws did not attempt
to prohibit or punish concubinage, instead enacting measures to maintain
the racial caste system and white supremacy.18 White society also provided
a ritualized outlet for such extramarital unions in quadroon balls, events
204 Michelle Brattain

organized by white entrepreneurs where wealthy white men courted

quadroon women. This courting led not to marriage but to a similarly legal
and contractual relationship known locally as p/a(:age, whereby a white
gentleman supported a young quadroon woman and her mother, provided
them with a home, and gave his name to any offspring. But as Monique
Guillory has argued, the quadroon balls did not represent a thoroughgoing
acceptance of interracial sex, for the whole ritual was carefully contained,
institutionalized, and legally limited in contract. 19
In the early nineteenth century, as moral reformers encouraged the spread
of antimiscegenation laws throughout the United States, Louisiana law con-
tinued to reflect a greater preoccupation with racial hierarchy and property
than with sex. 20 In 1825, for example, the legislature revised the civil code
to outlaw the legitimization of biracial children by white fathers, to prohibit
children of color from claiming paternity from white fathers, and to make it
more difficult for biracial children to receive an inheritance by disallowing
all but formal legal acknowledgment as a basis for establishing paternity.
Through such measures Louisianans eliminated the old French laws govern-
ing support of children born within p/a(:age and protected the interests of
white heirs from siblings of color. Interracial marriage remained illegal in
the sense that it was legally invalid, but the law did not prescribe punishment
for violators.21
The Civil War and Reconstruction temporarily undermined but ultimately
strengthened most southern antimiscegenation laws. The end of slavery
intensified white southern fears of interracial sex, and emancipation was fre-
quently touted as the first step to total social equality and unrestricted sex
across the race line (figure 9.1).22 Indeed, the term miscegenation was coined
in 1863 in a pamphlet, falsely attributed to the Republican Party, that
espoused interracial sex.23 In their brief return to southern statehouses dur-
ing the first phase of Reconstruction, former Confederates accordingly
attempted to reiterate and strengthen antebellum antimiscegenation laws in
black codes and revised state constitutions. When congressional radicals
took control of Reconstruction, however, the resulting empowerment of
black Republicans throughout the South meant that a number of states effec-
tively eliminated restrictions on interracial relationships, in many cases by
simply failing to enforce existing laws. Across the South, in Robinson's
words, Reconstruction "blurred the social lines just enough to encourage
some blacks and whites to form conspicuous interracial relationships." In
1868, Louisiana became the only southern state to repeal its antimiscegena-
tion laws as a result of black Republican leadership in the legislature. The
restoration of white Democratic control in the 1870s, however, resulted in
renewed restrictions on formal interracial relationships, if not interracial sex,
in every state but Louisiana. 24 Louisiana, for a short while, also remained
unique in not adopting antimiscegenation laws during Redemption.
In the 1890s, however, as white southern legislatures codified segrega-
tion, many state officials cracked down on interracial relationships with
renewed legal vigor. Louisiana's legislature followed suit in 1894 and
 Miscegenation 205

Figure 9.1 Isaac and Rosa, emancipated slave children from the Free Schools of Louisiana,
ca. 1863.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

became the last southern state to reintroduce prohibitions on interracial

marriage. Fear of interracial promiscuity likewise served as a compelling
argument for segregation. Urbanization and industrialization at the turn of
the century exacerbated the fears of white southerners because both black
and white women moved freely in workplaces, on city streets, on streetcars
and trains, and as patrons of commercial amusements-all sites outside the
scope of traditional patriarchal and racial authorities. Many whites, in
206 Michelle Brattain

Edward Ayers's words, found "[t]he sexual charge that might be created
among strangers temporarily placed in intimate surroundings" intolerable,
even if it did not result in direct physical contact. In 1890, an editorial in a
New Orleans newspaper argued in favor of segregated railcars, by stating
that any person "who believe [d] that the white race should be kept pure
from African taint" opposed the "commingling of the races inevitable in a
'mixed car.' " Articulating what the New Orleans editorial left to the imag-
ination, a Tennessee newspaper recounted one unfortunate white man's hor-
ror upon discovering that the young object of an extended flirtation on an
unsegregated train was not, in fact, white. 25
Late nineteenth-century courts also increasingly cited "racial integrity"
as the goal of antimiscegenation laws, claiming that interracial unions were
biologically unsound and therefore subject to the state's intervention. As the
courts repeatedly confronted the failure of such statutes and a growing pop-
ulation of mixed-race persons, proponents of banning interracial sex
defended and refined their arguments, which reflected a mixture of scientific
racism, eugenics, "reform" impulses, and the desirability of maintaining
racial "purity." Significantly, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, the shift from a law based on slavery to one based on the state's inter-
est in racial integrity and public welfare also created a legislative opening to
extend bans beyond black-white liaisons to whites' interactions with other
nonwhite groups. Virginia's 1924 racial integrity law, for example, declared
that it would be "unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any
save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than
white and American Indian." The exception granted to American Indians-
the so-called Pocahontas clause-also neatly demonstrated the susceptibility
of law to current political and social concerns. Whiteness included Indian-
ness as a concession to members of the Virginia elite who otherwise would
have no longer been white. 26
In twentieth-century Louisiana, antimiscegenation jurisprudence contin-
ued to reflect concerns with property and, particularly, racial boundariesY
As Virginia Dominguez argues, laws banning interracial marriage and
cohabitation, as well as statutes that denied nonwhite children the right to
inherit or to receive legal acknowledgment of white paternity, "all
amount[ ed] to legal efforts historically to ensure that relationship by 'blood'
did not entail equality of status or through equality of status equal access to
property." Moreover, the position of antimiscegenation law in the Louisiana
state code suggests the strength of state prohibitions. The code paired pro-
hibition of miscegenation with prohibition of incest of the first order
between consanguineous relatives, rather than with other articles that dealt
with adultery and second-order incest. In Dominguez's words, the pairing
"seems awkward but is telling": white lawmakers equated miscegenation
with the most socially abhorrent sexual deviance defined by the law. 28
If one looks back over Louisiana court records prior to Loving v.
Virginia's invalidation of antimiscegenation laws in 1967 and Louisiana's
repeal of its own law in 1972, however, one finds a curious discrepancy
 Miscegenation 207

between the large amount of white political rhetoric devoted to miscegena-

tion and the small number of cases about sex across the race line. While
state laws defining miscegenation and race itself ostensibly sought to insure
that interracial sex could not go undiscovered or unpunished, the state's
legal record of prosecutions and administrations of related issues in mar-
riage, divorce, and inheritance proceedings is surprisingly sparse. The
Louisiana Supreme Court (figure 9.2) reviewed more civil cases related to
miscegenation than the highest court of any other southern state, a reflec-
tion, perhaps, of its unique cultural heritage, but this represented a total of
only nineteen cases between 1868 and 1967. 29
If one were to take the appellate court's record as the measure of the
incidence of interracial sex, it would seem as though such unions almost
never happened and, from the white state's point of view, that segregation
was working. 3D As Robinson has noted, Louisiana was "a southern state
that legally both condemned and tolerated interracial sexual violators." In
this respect it resembled other states in the region, as strict antimiscegenation
laws did not necessarily result in their strict execution. Rather, they seem to
have functioned primarily as a social tool to discourage the public, domestic
interracial relationships that were more easily monitored by the law. 31
Between 1894, when Louisiana passed its antimiscegenation statute, and

Figure 9.2 Portrait of Governor Luther Egbert Hall (center) and judges of the Supreme Court
of Louisiana, ca. 1913.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.
208 Michelle Brattain

1967, when antimiscegenation laws were invalidated by the u.s. Supreme

Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, only five criminal cases appear in the
state case law. 32 Only two criminal cases heard at the appellate level, State v.
Daniel (1910) and State v. Harris (1922), resulted in conviction. Perhaps
most surprising is State of Louisiana v. Brown and Aymond (1959)-a case
prosecuted in the heat of conflict over integration and in which both of the
accused confessed-was dismissed by the Louisiana Supreme Court. Yet
such cases, even in their rarity, provide a provocative view of wider beliefs
and practices.
The Brown and Aymond case, for example, not only reveals much about
the complex of ideas and white anxieties surrounding miscegenation but
also provides many clues to why prosecutions of miscegenation were so
rare. The case concerned James Brown, Negro, and Lucille Aymond, white,
co-workers at a dry cleaner's shop in the rural, central Louisiana parish of
Avoyelles. Local police arrested them after their boss, David Blalock,
described their "suspicious" behavior to the sheriff. Blalock had become
concerned that Brown and Aymond were too friendly. He said as much to
Lucille Aymond and warned her to stay away from Brown. The deputy
sheriff arrested Brown and then Aymond. After three hours of questioning,
Brown confessed that he and Aymond had had intercourse in the bathroom
of the shop one day when Blalock was out. After two hours of questioning,
Aymond also confessed to the incident. Their confessions, which were rid-
dled with leading questions, were read into the civil district court record.
Both were indicted by the grand jury, tried, and convicted together in the
Avoyelles district court, and sentenced to a year of hard labor in the state
penitentiary in Angola. 33
Although Blalock had never seen physical contact between the two, their
initial transgression had been a friendship that defied customary racial eti-
quette. "I told her there was too much familiarity between the two of
them," he testified, and "that I'd like for her to stay on her side of the shop
and do her work and stay away from his side where his work was." Indeed,
Blalock confessed to the court that he had misgivings about hiring a black
man to work with Aymond in the first place. "I asked Mrs. Aymond if it was
agreeable and all right to have a colored man working along with her and if
she could stay in her place and keep him in his place," he explained,
"because I don't like to mix the two sexes and two races together."
According to Blalock, Aymond had replied that "she had worked with
[Brown] before and liked him and thought he was a nice fellow.,,34
When Blalock was pressed to define the "familiarity" he found so objec-
tionable, he replied, "Well, [Aymond] waiting on him, serving him coffee,
making him his coffee and bringing it to him, drinking coffee with him. She
with her cup and he with his standing together drinking coffee. "35 Of
course, drinking coffee together is not ordinarily indicative of sexual inti-
macy. But by defying the usual lines of servility and putting Aymond in the
role of a white female employee serving a black man, their coffee breaks did
breach the customs of Jim Crow. Racial etiquette strictly constrained the
 Miscegenation 209

range of acceptable interactions between black men and white women. For
the judge and jury, Aymond and Brown's breaks may have evoked other
exchanges with sexual overtones-for example, the image of a secretary
serving a boss, also an ostensibly professional relationship but one that
labor historians have long understood to be emotionally charged. 36 Blalock
made a point of noting that they drank coffee at the "back of the shop"
rather than in areas where they would be subject to the scrutiny of
customers. Simply putting themselves in such a position, he implied, merited
suspicion. He also reported that neighbors were talking about the two and
that Aymond and her husband socialized with Brown outside of work,
attending boxing matches and traveling together to New Orleans. 37
The Brown-Aymond affair thus dovetailed with many of the myths per-
petuated by overwrought whites in the age of integration-namely, that
integrated workplaces, lapses in etiquette, and social mixing were danger-
ous because they allIed to one thing: interracial sex. Prompted by leading
questions, Brown and Aymond each portrayed the other in ways that were
consistent with cliches about interracial sex. In their confessions, neither
admitted to a romantic or consensual affair. According to Brown, Aymond
was, in his 1950s parlance, no "lady." She talked "about men and women
all the time," Brown charged, "so finally one day she told me if I didn't lay
her I would be sorry." In contrast, Aymond portrayed Brown as the
aggressor and herself as a penitent victim, who had been inexplicably over-
whelmed by Brown's advances: "I don't know what made me do it. It just
seemed that when he asked me, I just had to give it to him. I don't know
why, I don't know what came over me.,,38
Although Brown and Aymond's defense attorney argued, among other
points, that the statute against miscegenation was unconstitutional, the
Louisiana Supreme Court took the opportunity to reassert the state's right
to regulate sex. Citing two United States Supreme Court rulings, the justices
noted that Pace v. State of Alabama (1883) held that antimiscegenation laws
did not violate the equal protection clause of the Constitution because equal
penalties were imposed on each race. Indeed the district attorney noted in
his brief that "we most likely could have made a deal with one of the par-
ties, say Mrs. Aymond, to turn State's evidence, but we felt that certainly
both were equally guilty and that to do so would have been discriminatory."
As to the constitutionality of antimiscegenation law, the Louisiana Supreme
Court asserted that the law fell "squarely within the police power of
the state, which has an interest in maintaining the purity of the races and in
preventing the propagation of half-breed children." Then, in an odd twist,
the court reworked the arguments put forth in Brown v. Board of
Education as justification for its own ruling in State v. Brown and Aymond.
"Half-breed" children found it difficult to be accepted, the Louisiana court
declared, and quoting the Brown decision, it observed that there is "no
doubt that children in such a situation are burdened 'with a feeling of infe-
riority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and
minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.' "39
210 Michelle Brattain

Despite the court's ardent defense of the antimiscegenation laws, details of

the case reveal a lack of urgency on the matter at the local level. Blalock did
not rush out to report the incident to the police. Nor were Brown and
Aymond particularly secretive about their friendship. In fact, Brown had ini-
tially been arrested because Blalock charged that Brown had embezzled
money from him. Only then had Blalock mentioned his other suspicions to
Leon Franklin, a deputy sheriff who decided to conduct his own investigation
of possible miscegenation. If the two had not confessed, it is easy to imagine
that the charges might have been a subterfuge for Franklin to hassle Brown at
the behest of Blalock, who was angry about something else. The questions
posed to Brown suggested that Blalock had been suspicious for some time.
He even claimed to have caught them in the act. According to a transcript of
the interrogation, Franklin asked Brown, "James when Mr. David came to the
laundry, one day, he said Miss Lucille come out of the rest room and he didn't
see you ... when he got to the shop no one was in the front part, he called
and no one answered, after a few minutes Lucille came out of the rest room
straightening her clothes. A little later Mr. David said you came in the front
door. He said he then suspicioned something was wrong, and he went into the
back and the back door was opened which he said he always kept closed. Was
that one of the days you had a sexual intercourse with Lucille?" Brown denied
it, but he did so within the rules of Jim Crow, addressing the deputy as
"Mr. Leon." Only much later did he admit an affair with Aymond, and then
he conceded, "[Y]es, sir, I know it was wrong."40
The other important factor with bearing on how to read the historical
record was the difficulty of proving miscegenation in court. Article 79 of the
Louisiana Criminal Code defined it as "the marriage or habitual cohabita-
tion of with knowledge of their difference in race, between a person of the
Caucasian or white race and a person of the colored or Negro race.,,41
While the court read "cohabit" as including more generally "sexual
relations or acts of sexual intercourse," the crime itself was difficult to
prove. Sharing a home was "strong, if not convincing, evidence of habitual
intercourse," according to the court. Interracial marriages were proof of a
violation, but such cases were rarely before the judges. Had Aymond pro-
duced some of the "half-breed" children that so concerned the court, they
might have served as proof. But in this particular case, the only evidence
that illegal sex had taken place was Blalock's suspicion and the confessions.
On the witness stand, Blalock admitted that he had not seen Brown and
Aymond have any physical contact. The state had, in the court's words, "no
other evidence, 'literally none at all.' "Nor would the confessions suffice.
A basic rule of criminal law holds that conviction requires a corpus delicti,
or proof that a crime has been committed. Confessions could not be admit-
ted into the record until the commission of a crime had been established.
Thus, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the confessions did not
constitute grounds to convict and reversed the lower court's verdict. 42
The difficulty of proving interracial sex outside of marriage, as demon-
strated by State v. Brown and Aymond, may explain the sparse court record
 Miscegenation 21 1

on the issue at the appellate level. Though many whites told themselves that
informed, consensual sex between races was unimaginable, interracial sex
did occur; when it occurred secretly, outside of marriage or a home, that
circumstance could circumvent the state's usual legal gatekeeping
mechanisms. 43 Appellate cases, in spite of their accessibility to historians,
might not be the level where most convictions or accusations can be found.
Brown and Aymond were atypical in choosing to appeal. Their attorney,
armed with the decision in Perez v. Sharp, a 1948 California case that over-
ruled the state's antimiscegenation law, may have believed the time was right
to challenge the constitutionality of Louisiana's law. 44 The Louisiana
Supreme Court, in turn, may have granted a rehearing because the justices
wanted to reassert the constitutionality of their state law. Criminal prosecu-
tions probably occurred more often, and perhaps proceeded more success-
fully, at the local level. The Times-Picayune, for example, reported a
handful of prosecutions in New Orleans and its vicinity in the postwar
years. Marcus Christian kept records on official accusations as well as doc-
uments supporting his own suspicions. 45 Furthermore, not all cases went to
court. A highly publicized racial identity case involving Ralph Dupas, a
professional boxer who sued to obtain a "white" birth certificate necessary
to compete in segregated bouts, was preceded by a 1956 miscegenation
charge leveled against his brother Peter. That charge was dropped, and at
least two couples charged with illegal marriages by the same grand jury
resided in states that refused to extradite them. 46
State v. Brown and Aymond also underlines the persistence of extralegal
means to prevent sex across the race line. Communities deployed ostracism
and gossip, and because white southern culture would not recognize the
willing consent of white women, white anxiety and anger were also
channeled into demonizing black men as rapists and using threats of lynch-
ing to punish alleged transgressionsY Blalock, for example, had first con-
fronted Aymond directly, and his testimony suggested that talking may have
also been intended to shame the couple into more discretion, if not an end
to their affair.
Miscegenation does appear, however, with some regularity elsewhere in
the state's legal record, and these cases suggest ways that couples may have
hidden sexual relationships under the cover of more traditional black-white
relationships. A large body of civil case law concerning inheritance, succes-
sion, and concubinage includes numerous cases of interracial relationships
brought to the court's attention throughout the first half of the twentieth
century. The significance of this category of law is suggested by the statutory
record in Louisiana, which until 1942 addressed miscegenation primarily
under laws about concubinage, rather than marriage. As the Louisiana
Supreme Court acknowledged in Succession of Lannes (1936), "Various
kinds of disguises have been utilized by parties to conceal the relation of con-
cubinage-housekeeper, storekeeper, cook, maid, nurse, niece, sister-in-law,
etc. ,,48 The first five categories were particularly meaningful for black
women and white men, as black women more often held such jobs in white
212 Michelle Brattain

households. Christian's unpublished manuscript also contains similar

anecdotes. 49 Historians have likewise recognized the intimacy inherent in such
relationships as well as the sexual vulnerability that employment in white
households imposed on black women. In at least a few cases, the record
suggests that jobs otherwise conforming to expectations of white-black
relationships may have provided cover for illicit relationships. 50
The relationship between J. W. Jones, white, and his "cook" Amanda
Kyle, Negro, seems to have been such a case. Kyle lived in Jones's house
from 1904 until 1907 or 1908 and, after that, in a house he built for her on
his property. Kyle cooked and kept house for Jones and waited on cus-
tomers at his store. They did not have children, but, according to the neigh-
bors, "general talk" was that Jones was "keeping" Kyle. One acquaintance
even claimed to have found them in bed together. Apparently no one ever
reported their activity as criminal. The relationship might have never
appeared in the record had Jones not left all of his considerable estate,
worth approximately $40,000 in 1926, to Kyle, provoking a challenge from
Jones's nieces and nephews.
In court, the nieces and nephews attacked the relationship and charged
that Kyle and Jones had lived together in a state of illegal "open concubi-
nage." As defined by Louisiana law, "open concubinage" was more morally
repugnant and damaging to community morals than secret concubinage and
was therefore punished by limiting the surviving partner's right to inherit
from the other's estate. 51 Kyle denied that she was any more to Jones than
his cook, and at least a dozen witnesses so testified on her behalf.
Interestingly the legal issue was not the relationship per se, but whether it
was open or secret, which had a direct bearing on her right to inherit. The
court concluded that Kyle and Jones had been a couple, citing among other
evidence her access to Jones's cash drawer and their living together, but the
court disagreed with Jones's nieces and nephews, concluding that the rela-
tionship was secret. Jones hid his relationship while keeping "her in his
employ ostensibly as cook and housekeeper and assistant in his store" In
fact, by folding the document so that only the signature lines were exposed,
he had even kept the contents of his will a secret from the witnesses who
signed it. Therefore Kyle was allowed to inherit Jones's estate. 52
It would of course be a mistake to draw too broad a conclusion from this
case, as the employer-employee relationship can be entirely professional,
entirely antagonistic, or simply abusive. In many situations, household serv-
ice subjected women to sexual harassment and made them vulnerable to
assault. The white mythology of black hypersexuality historically subjected
black women to much abuse that white men described as consensual. But
the existence of Amanda Kyle and those involved in a handful of similar
cases in the twentieth century does suggest a significant loophole in Jim
Crow laws where interracial relationships could escape attentionY As
many labor historians note, the private and intimate nature of household
service historically posed a latent ideological challenge to segregation, even
if white society's commitment to having inexpensive and readily available
 Miscegenation 213

black help always trumped such ideological inconsistencies. Indeed, some

historians argue that the figure of an asexual, apolitical, maternal black
household worker serving the white home was central to whites' self-image
and exercise of power at the turn of the century.54 It is thus deeply ironic
that given white preoccupation with preventing interracial sex as the key to
maintaining whiteness, the service of black workers provided a site where
interracial intimacy could be hidden or denied. The employer-servant rela-
tionship was one that most whites accepted as natural, appropriate, and
even benign. Significantly, in the case of J. W. Jones and Amanda Kyle, the
neighbors talked, but no one challenged the appropriateness of a white man
having a live-in black female housekeeper.
By far the most visible arena of state activism against miscegenation,
however, was directed toward preventing it, not punishing it. In Louisiana,
state definitions of who was white and who was black did not always
correspond to social definitions, so antimiscegenation law often required
steps to prevent an inadvertent marriage of people across the race line. One
of Marcus Christian's strategies in looking for clues to miscegenation, for
example, was to scour the Times-Picayune white society pages for photo-
graphs of racially ambiguous "whites."55 Interestingly, state officials often
worked with some of the same "folk" indicators of race that Christian
employed, and they sometimes delayed or denied marriage licenses on the
basis of any number of factors: a suspicious surname, an applicant having
been born in a locale known to have a large mixed-race population, and
simply the officials' own doubts. Local registrars acted on their authority as
long-term residents, who "knew" which families were black and which
were white. The state bureau of vital statistics and its counterpart in
New Orleans (the two offices under the state board of health charged with
maintaining records) also used access to vital statistics to verify and main-
tain the integrity of racial statistics. 56 The requirement that race appear on
marriage licenses probably prevented an untold number of persons from
unknowingly marrying across the legal line separating black from white.
Members of "white" families, when informed that the family had a "touch
of the tar brush," might complain, write letters to their state representative,
appeal to the directors of the board of health, or even bring a lineup of blue-
eyed, blond relatives to the registrar's office, but, according to bureau
employees, the angered family often avoided court because of the potential
for public exposure. 57
Licensing of marriage thus provided the state its main legal avenue to
intervene against interracial relationships and, in turn, played a singular role
in shaping the law of racial identity in Louisiana. Twentieth-century racial
identity trials, including those in Louisiana, have received considerable
attention from scholars, and the trials in the following case studies generally
conform to the dynamics identified in those studies. The legal system in
Louisiana, as elsewhere in the United States, defined whiteness in terms of
exclusion. It said not what made a person white, but what put a person out-
side the favored class. As legal scholars and historians have shown, this
214 Michelle Brattain

standard has variously served to defend white supremacy, limit access to

citizenship, deprive nonwhite groups of property and civil rights, and main-
tain "racial integrity. "58 Antimiscegenation law has also played a primary
role in defining whiteness and in shaping the legal discourse of race. 59
In the first half of the twentieth century, Louisiana's legislature and
supreme court attempted to eliminate any remaining loopholes allowing
marriage between whites and mixed-race persons. In doing so the legislature
and court imposed both the notorious "one-drop" rule and the extraordi-
nary legal standard of "no room for doubt" for those who might challenge
their legal racial designation. State v. Treadaway et al. (1910), for example,
considered the legality of a relationship between Octave Treadaway, white,
and his companion, Josephine Lightell, an octoroon (commonly understood
in Louisiana to be someone "one-eighth Negro"). The law subject to debate
in this case was a 1908 statute making interracial concubinage between
whites and persons "of the [N]egro or black race" a felony. Given the his-
toric use of the terms Negro and black in Louisiana, the state supreme court
was forced to determine that an "octoroon" was perhaps "colored," but not
a "Negro," and therefore not covered by the 1908 law. 60 However, the
decision prompted the next session of the state legislature to make a
hasty revision of the law to include any "person of the colored or
black race .... "61 "Colored," the Louisiana supreme court had decided, was
a category broader than "Negro" and included a person of "mixed blood."
As Dominguez argues, this case was an important turning point in Louisiana
history away from the old tripartite system (black, white, and colored)
toward a binary understanding of race (black/white) and reflected a chang-
ing ideological climate. 62 In 1938 another intermarriage case, Sunseri v.
Cassagne, firmly established the "one-drop" rule in Louisiana jurisprudence,
as the court decided that any trace of African ancestry required a person to
be designated "colored."63 The case did not involve criminal miscegenation,
but the race of a wife and thus the legality of a marriage were at issue.
Sunseri, like all the cases considered in this essay, indicated the important
and recurring role that knowledge of race-and particularly the state's con-
trol of that knowledge-played in cases involving miscegenation. In Brown
and Aymond's case, one argument made by their defense had been that the
state had not proven the race of the defendants or their knowledge of each
other's race. The statute describing criminal miscegenation specifically
noted that violation of the law required knowledge of race by the accused
parties. Although the district attorney argued that "the jurors certainly had
an opportunity to view the defendants and observe their color," observation
often proved less important than knowledge of official records in establish-
ing legal racial identity.64 Inclusion of that phrase in the law itself gestured
toward an important area in Louisiana jurisprudence, as the race of one
party was often the issue under litigation.
While Sunseri is frequently cited as the preeminent example of white
Louisiana's dogmatic inflexibility on matters of black and white, a closer
examination of the full case record-a level of documentation often
 Miscegenation 215

overlooked in legal studies-provides insight into the popular understandings

of race that often governed relationships and ultimately decisions about
marriage. In 1936, Cyril P. Sunseri, a New Orleans resident facing prosecu-
tion for nonpayment of alimony, filed for an annulment of his marriage on
the grounds that his wife, Verna Cassagne, was "a person of color." The
state supreme court eventually determined that Cassagne was a descendant
of Fanny Ducre, a former slave, with traceable African ancestry and there-
fore annulled the marriage; however, the testimony collected in the civil
district court provides a unique and revealing insight into the collective pop-
ular perceptions of race in mid-twentieth-century Louisiana. It poignantly
speaks to the legal conundrum in distinguishing between representation and
essence, as Eva Saks has so ably described. But the record also reveals the
essentially epistemological, or socially learned, nature of race in everyday
life. The court made a simple black-white decision, but repeatedly witnesses
proved reluctant, if not unable, to do the same. 65
Cyril Sunseri and Verna Cassagne met while she was attending a white
high school. In 1935, when she was seventeen, they eloped and then moved in
with her mother, Stella Cusachs Cassagne. They lived together for several
months, until, according to Verna and Stella Cassagne and several friends of
the family, Cyril Sunseri became abusive and Stella Cassagne evicted him from
the house. Sunseri claimed that he left on his own accord "when he found out
what kind of tramp she was." Because Verna Cassagne was a minor, the case
fell under the jurisdiction of the juvenile court, which ordered Sunseri to pay
support. Although his reference to Cassagne as a "tramp" deployed a com-
mon racial stereotype, he claimed that race was not the issue when they first
separated. According to Sunseri, "It must have been three weeks or so after I
had left her when someone told me they heard she had colored blood and
I started investigating."66 He contacted a lawyer and his senator and filed for
annulment. His case rested on the status of Verna Cassagne's great-great-
grandmother Fanny, a slave emancipated in 1837 by Leander Ducre, her
white owner who later became her husband. Fanny Ducre was identified on
subsequent documents, notarial acts under which she acquired slaves, as
"EW.C.," or "Free woman of color," and "EC.L.," or Femme de Couleur
Libre, ambiguous terms that applied in the antebellum period to anyone not
recognized as purely "white," but these labels did not necessarily mean some-
one of Mrican descent or someone who had been a slave. The term Colored
became synonymous with Negro only after the Civil War.67 Cassagne's
lawyers appealed to Louisiana's equivalent of the Virginia Pocahontas clause
and argued that Fanny Ducre was an Indian, not a Negro. 68
The court considered documentary evidence such as certificates of birth,
marriage, and death; obituaries; and voter registration records, as well as
witness testimony on how the Cassagnes conducted themselves as white
people. Verna Cassagne had been born in a white maternity ward,
had received her first communion in a white church, had attended white
public schools, and had graduated from a white girls' school. Her
mother was vice president of the New Orleans Linen Supply Company,
216 Michelle Brattain

a "white organization," according to the court; was a registered white

Democratic voter; and had participated in several primary elections-
without challenge, the court emphasized. Both women had occupied white
seats on buses, streetcars, and trains, and they attended theaters, patronized
hotels, and ate at restaurants for whites. Stella Cassagne's explanation for
the most damning evidence, Verna's birth certificate identifying her as
"colored," was that when a representative of the board of health had come
to her home after the birth, she was ill, an aunt, now deceased, had filled out
the card, and the board had made a mistake. The original card, according to
the chief clerk, had been lost. 69
Over a dozen witnesses who had known Fanny Ducre and her descen-
dants were called to the stand, and much of the testimony concerned the
appearances, both physical and social, of the family members in question.
Witnesses disagreed on how to identify a white, a Negro, and an Indian, and
they provided wildly contradictory descriptions. Various witnesses
described Fanny Ducre as "a nigger woman, plain straight"; "dark
skinned"; "black"; "of a copper color" with "long straight black hair";
"someone who always did go for white"; as having "tolerable fair hair,
what we call Madagascar hair"; "just like an Indian and nice hair hanging
straight back, just as straight as you want"; and always "taken for white
people."?O The distinction between "Indian" and "Negro" proved particu-
larly difficult to pin down in court. Questioning a woman who identified
herself as "colored," the district attorney asked, "Aunt Fanny was about
your color, wasn't she?" He received the answer, "No, just like I tell you,
just like an Indian." When he replied, "Don't tell us that. Tell us what an
Indian looks like," she could only add, "Just like an Indian." The court then
pressed for elaboration: "What do you mean by an Indian? How did she
look?" "Well," the witness replied, "an Indian look a nice color. I can't say,
me. You don't see Indian?"71 The attorneys occasionally tried to pin down
descriptions by asking witnesses to compare Fanny to themselves: "Your
color is considered brown or yellow, isn't it?" and "Was your hair straight
before it went gray? "72 A woman identified as Fanny's daughter-in-law told
the court, "She was black, she was about my color. She couldn't be white,
you know I can't be white, can I? She was about my color, no difference in
her and me." Even with such direct comparisons, the results were absurd, as
the court recognized the subjectivity of descriptions and then entered its
own opinion as fact. Of the daughter-in-law, the court "admitted that this
witness is a very dark negress, the usual color of a person of Negro race, a
full-blooded Negro." The record was peppered with such observations:
"It is admitted the witness's hair is kinky."?3
Though many witnesses entered physical descriptions with some cer-
tainty, few made confident pronouncements about the race of a subject in
question. Most of the testimony merely underlined the uncertainty of
whether Fanny and her descendants were white or black. Some suggested
that Fanny and her children had "passed" as white, although the court in
this case focused exclusively on the issue of the marriage rather than the
 Miscegenation 217

question of deliberate deception. Many accounts made it clear that racial

definitions were contextual and contingent. When the deputy recorder of
births, deaths, and marriages in New Orleans was questioned about the
death certificate of one of Fanny Ducre's sons, Drauzin Ducre, he said that
he knew the deceased man but was uncertain about Ducre's race, "Well," he
told the court, "I wasn't a native over there, but he was always considered
colored, but of course 1 never looked in-had no occasion to look up
whether he was or not. "74 Another witness who knew Drauzin Ducre said
that "he might be a white man, he never told me, but he always used go with
the white people, never come amongst us [colored] at all. "75 Another wit-
ness testified that Fanny's other son, Toussaint Ducre, was a "Negro" but
looked like a white man. "He could pass anywhere for a white man," she
told the court, "and 1 can prove it because he worked for a white man and
went to the St. Charles [Hotel] with him."76 When the registrar of Lacombe
answered questions about Verna Cassagne's mother, Stella Cusachs, she
said, "The hearsay was always they [the Cusachs] were colored and that
I couldn't prove." When asked whether this was majority opinion in
Lacombe, she could say only that "amongst the white people they were
always considered colored."77
That the testimony about relatives several generations back should be
contradictory is perhaps not surprising, but more striking were the condi-
tional terms with which witnesses deployed racial categories with respect to
themselves or the defendants. When a resident of Lacombe, who testified as
an acquaintance of Fanny Ducre, was asked whether she herself was
"colored," she replied, "Well, I will tell you the truth, I can't tell you 1 am
colored and I can't tell you 1 am white, because I may be Italian, my mother
and father, and 1 can't say if they were white or colored, you understand, a
person should come with the truth." The court declared her "light tan or
light brown" but did not admit whether she was "colored" or "white."
Interestingly, this witness was nevertheless certain about what race Fanny
Ducre's daughter should be: "She always did go for white, but she wasn't.
She was colored. "78 A friend of the Cassagnes, Pauline Roubion, who lived
with Stella Cassagne when the newly wed Sunseris moved in, described her-
self as being of "Italian descent" -ordinarily a marker for whiteness-but
was surprisingly noncommittal when asked about her "race." Asked
whether she was white, she replied: "I think I am .... Well, maybe, some
might think 1 am colored because 1 am supposed to be staying with colored
people or I stayed with colored people [the Cassagnes]." However, she had
never heard anyone say that the Cassagnes were "colored." Verna
Cassagne's attorney declared that Roubion was white; Cyril Sunseri's attor-
ney admitted only that "she has the appearance of a white person."79 Even
Sunseri, when asked about his friends, who were not subjects of the pro-
ceedings at hand, answered vaguely and said only "I knew them as being
white.,,8o Neighbors, according to an acquaintance of the Cassagnes, had
called them "Negroes," and though the Cassagnes allegedly threatened to
file charges, they never did. 81 Verna Cassagne said she had "been taught"
218 Michelle Brattain

that she was of French, Spanish, and English descent. Sunseri's attorneys
claimed that the Cassagnes had become known as white only when they
moved to New Orleans. 82
The manner in which witnesses described race was striking-resembling
the observations of historians more than the answers one might expect from
people living under segregation. However, mid-twentieth-century
Louisianans did not believe that race was simply a social construction; most
of the people in court, whether they identified themselves as "white" or
"colored"-and certainly the ones who ventured speculation about people
passing as white-probably did believe that there were genuine categories of
"colored" and "white." Their testimony also indicated that they believed that
there was a right answer about who belonged in which one. But they also
believed that they could be wrong and seem to have intuitively understood the
fluidity of one measure and the rigidity of the other.
The operative phrase for many was "to know someone as." Many of the
witnesses implicitly recognized the distance between an epistemological
understanding of race as something "known" and a kind of absolute, hid-
den essence of race that supposedly lay behind the legally valid, official
designation. Yet they still seemed committed to the metaphysical view
that there really was a racial fact of the matter. In other words they admitted
that they could not read race on a body or know race with certainty
when they encountered a person in day-to-day life. Until a person landed in
court or official records were checked, social knowledge was the informa-
tion that mattered. Even the Louisiana Supreme Court that had granted
Verna Cassagne a second opportunity to gather evidence to prove her white-
ness, acknowledged the significance of such social validation. In the first
trial, the court concluded, "the evidence, while persuasive, is not conclusive
and does not warrant us in holding that defendant is a member of the col-
ored race, particularly in view of the overwhelming testimony that she and
her immediate associates have always been regarded as members of the
white race and have associated with persons of that race," Both the court
and the witnesses thus implicitly recognized two sorts of identity, neither of
which could be absolutely determined by physical descriptions or, in this
case, by documentary records. Unfortunately for Verna Cassagne, on a
second hearing the court determined that birth and marriage certificates
identifying her mother, her aunts, and herself as colored were more persua-
sive than testimony from friends and neighbors. Those documents left the
court "no alternative" but to conclude that she had "a traceable amount of
[N]egro blood" and to annul the marriage. 83
Such logical conundrums had roots in Louisiana's unique history, a past
with which many witnesses in this and other twentieth-century cases had direct
experience. The enduring controversy over the racial meaning of Creole, for
example, illustrated both the ambiguity of racial categories in Louisiana and
the long history of white Louisianans' discomfort with that uncertainty. A term
adopted in the early nineteenth century to describe Louisiana residents of
European descent and to distinguish them from new American settlers, Creole
 Miscegenation 219

was not originally a racial or racially exclusive category. Although, much to the
consternation of white Creoles, outsiders occasionally assumed that Creole
implied mixed blood, locals did not initially insist that the term apply to whites
only. Rather, as historian Joseph G. Tregle Jr. notes, white New Orleanians
constructed an elaborate myth about Creoles in contrast to Americans, as an
exclusive local aristocracy descended from French and Spanish nobility,
"renowned for ... cultural refinement and worldly sophistication.... " In
doing so, they felt no need to limit their use of Creole to whites, as they
"perceived no danger from common acceptance of blacks and whites under the
Creole rubric, [and] no risk that such definitional partnership might diminish
the social status or prerogative of the dominant class. "84
After the Civil War, however, white Creoles no longer "feigned uncon-
cerned amusement" when outsiders mistakenly assumed that Creole meant
something other than white. In the late nineteenth century, the post-
Reconstruction surge of white supremacy, the imposition of segregation,
and the fame of George Washington Cable's writings on Louisiana Creoles
as racially mixed unleashed an obsessive fixation on race among white New
Orleans Creoles. 85 A number of Creole social organizations and scholars
claimed the title Creole and began defining it as exclusively white.
Interestingly, in his research and public addresses, Marcus Christian begged
to differ, claiming Creole as a category specifically defined as mixed-race
descent. Virginia Dominguez's fascinating study of the manipulations and
contradictions that shaped self-conceptions of identity in Louisiana in the
late twentieth century reveals the long-term significance of such anxieties
over whiteness. Many of the self-identified white Creole informants whom
she interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s made a point of explaining to her
that they were not colored. But the continuing disputes about the racial sta-
tus of Creoles also implicitly recognized that individual Louisianans could
not completely control their own racial identity. "Suspicion" was "part of
everyday life," Dominguez concludes, and "[w]hites often grow up afraid to
know their own genealogies." Many families, Dominguez found, simply left
Louisiana after "rumors spread about their questionable ancestry."86
Marriage law took on a substantial part of the burden in drawing and
policing the line between black and white. It was one of the few places
where the state could bridge the gap between epistemological and meta-
physical understandings of race and impose the final authority of its own
definition. In Cassagne's case, regulation of marriage had become the tool to
prevent any further descendants of the Cassagne family from passing as
white in Louisiana. Moreover, it established the standard of proof to be met
by any other plaintiff accused of passing or claiming to be legally white. In
Sunseri v. Cassagne, the court determined that claims against the accuracy
of state documents must produce sufficient evidence such that there could
be "no room for doubt" that the original classification was wrong. This was
an exceptionally stringent burden of proof, as legal scholars have noted,
even "more difficult to carry than the criminal 'beyond a reasonable doubt'
standard," but the ruling determined judgments in later casesY
220 Michelle Brattain

The final case considered here, Villa v. Lacoste, an annulment case heard
before the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1948, revealed ongoing tensions
within Louisianans' concepts of racial identity, as witnesses repeatedly
demonstrated their adherence to more complex and contingent appraisals of
race than the law would allow. This case also underlined the significance of
socially understood racial identity, since the evidence suggests that if the
couple had not separated, Josephine Lacoste's status as white would have
never been questioned. As in the Sunseri case, the "discovery" of race hap-
pened long after the fact. In order to avoid paying alimony to support his
wife, Josephine Lacoste, and their six-year-old son, Charles Stephen Villa
sued for an annulment and a disclaimer of paternity, claiming that his wife
was Negro, on the basis of a birth certificate identifying her as "colored."
The issue for the court was Josephine Lacoste's maternal line. Her father
was French and therefore white, but her mother, Catherine Lacoste, was the
child of a white woman and an immigrant from the Philippines. 88 How to
classify Filipinos in the racial system of New Orleans had been a "bone of
contention" among the staff of the board of health for some time. 89 Other
persons of Asian descent, including Chinese and Japanese immigrants, were
registered by nationality, but Filipino immigrants, who were uncommon
outside the western United States and, in the context of Louisiana, certainly
exotic, were a gray area for the board of health. 90 Catherine Lacoste had the
misfortune of having the birth of her daughter Josephine registered by a
deputy recorder who recognized only two categories, white and colored,
and considered Asians to be the latter. Although the elder Lacoste, who had
registered her grandson's birth on behalf of her daughter, worked in a white
job in a white department store, was registered to vote in white Democratic
primaries, and was registered as white on her marriage certificate, she
obeyed when the recorder said that she could not register the birth of her
daughter or grandson as white. "When the man told me to put colored," she
explained to the court, "I put colored."91 She could just as easily have been
told to register the child as white because the deputy recorder's successor
regarded Filipinos as white.92
Although nine states had laws prohibiting marriages between Filipinos
and whites, Filipinos were not directly addressed in Louisiana's antimisce-
genation statute, which, as written and litigated, reflected its ties to
segregation and had applied only to persons of African descent. 93 Rather
than arguing in favor of a more abstract "racial integrity" in order to annul
the marriage, Villa's attorneys revealed their own commitment to the black-
white binary by arguing that Filipinos were actually "Negroes." Citing
Webster's Dictionary, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and anthropological
texts on the Philippines, Villa's lawyers attempted to prove "the existence of
Negroes or blacks or Negroid or negritoes in the Philippine Islands, since
'negritoes' was 'Spanish' for 'little Negroes.' " Lacoste's witnesses included
an eighty-six-year old friend of her grandfather, who had emigrated with
him, and the elderly man made a point of emphasizing that Lacoste's
grandfather was a "Blanco Filipino," or white Filipino. Indulging in a little
 Miscegenation 221

scientific racism of their own, Lacoste's attorneys argued that "in no event
can plaintiffs counsel locate an acceptable authority that a 'Filipino Blanco'
can be a Negrito. The dwarfish, backward, wholly uncivilized Negritos have
virtually no commerce or contact with other inhabitants of the Philippine
Islands, and if a single one has come to the United States, it was doubtless as
a chained or caged captive."94 Undaunted, Villa's attorneys still pressed the
Negro line, asking her grandfather's Filipino friend whether there were "any
colored people at all on the Philippine Islands?" and whether he had ever
"seen a Negro in the Philippine Islands?" 95
Evidence accepted in district court concerning this case, like that consid-
ered in Sunseri, consisted of both documentary and social evidence of race,
and the social evidence took up much of the proceedings. Charles Villa and
Josephine Lacoste had known each other since they were teenagers, having
met in a hosiery factory where both had worked in "white" jobs. Lacoste
had attended white schools; her baby had been delivered in a white mater-
nity ward. She always kept to the white side of the segregation line in pub-
lic conveyances. When the court asked her if she sat in the white section of
the theater, she answered, "Why not? I always placed myself as white."
Furthermore, no one "had ever questioned her color.,,96 Villa himself said he
"never had any suspicion about her color." "It all come up," he told the
court, when "a cousin of mine and a relation of hers that ran away and they
got married, and a remark was passed [that] they were colored." His
mother, who had heard rumors about the color of the Lacostes, "went up
there [to the board of health] to satisfy herself, to find out whether it was
true or not as far as my wife was concerned."97 There, she discovered the
"colored" birth certificates.
Interestingly, Villa's attorneys did not try to prove that Filipinos gener-
ally, rather than "negritoes" specifically, were "colored" or even that they
were "Malay," which would have made the marriage illegal in several other
states. 98 Neither side referred to resolutions of the issue in states other than
Louisiana. For all the witnesses, as well as the lower and higher courts, the
important issues were whiteness and blackness. Villa's attorneys tried to link
Lacoste to "colored" people in New Orleans, where the family lived. Villa
claimed that his wife and mother-in-law visited with a "colored family that
lived on the corner.... They allow my baby to go in and out the house, like
it is one of the family." Visiting might not be proof of sharing the same
racial identity, so Villa's attorney's asked him: "They sit down and eat at the
same table?" Villa admitted that he had never seen them eating together.
Catherine Lacoste, falling back on another Louisiana standby for describing
racial ambiguity, said the family on the corner was "Spanish," which in this
context also meant white. Another witness for Villa, however, gestured
toward another social indicator of race commonly recognized in court,
claiming that he knew the neighbors in question were colored because the
wife had worked for his mother as household help. Lacoste's counsel
brought their white friends forward to attest to the Lacoste family's
whiteness. One family friend, asked if she was white, said, "I hope I am."
222 Michelle Brattain

She reported that she had visited the Lacoste home "quite often" and had
"never seen any niggers there.,,99
Charles Villa, who had sought the annulment, apparently also had more
flexible views of race than his suit allowed. Two weeks after filing for an
annulment, he went to visit Josephine Lacoste, she said, and suggested "we
go away, leave town, pack up and leave town." Apparently he believed the
rumors about her "colored" blood but nevertheless wanted to reconcile and
live somewhere the marriage would be legal. His wife told him "it was no
use, that it would still be hanging over my head." She had always been
accepted and had access to all the benefits of being white in New Orleans,
but she felt it necessary to prove that she was not "colored."lOo
The state supreme court obliged and ruled that the Filipino Lacoste fam-
ily was mistakenly registered as "colored. "101 In Louisiana, if a person was
"not Negro," that was all that mattered for the sake of marriage to a white
person. But the court's willingness to override the documentary evidence in
this case did not in any way indicate a slackening of the justices' racial
views. If anything, it confirmed the significance of the black-white line and
the real intent of antimiscegenation statutes, which was to prevent one kind
of interracial marriage. As it happened, the rigidity of Louisiana justice on
the black/white line served Josephine Lacoste well.
In the late 1950s, the state turned the accoutrements of antimiscegenation
law-its records and licensing functions-even more directly to the defense of
segregation. Ironically, it was the impending collapse of segregation in other
parts of society that led Louisiana state authorities to adopt more stringent
procedures to strengthen antimiscegenation law. The shoring up of broad seg-
regation laws and their concurrent discouragement of miscegenation may
have contributed to the slim numbers of miscegenation cases in state courts.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, in the interest of "racial integrity" and in defi-
ance of school desegregation, Louisiana's legislature passed 131 additional
segregation statutes, far more than any other southern state. New laws segre-
gated "all public parks, recreation centers, playgrounds, community centers
and other such facilities" and prohibited racial interactions in situations rang-
ing from interracial sporting competition, to shared eating utensils, to the
mixture of "black" and "white" blood plasma in hospitals. 102 The newly for-
tified segregation laws strengthened antimiscegenation efforts by prohibiting
the sort of casual contact that many believed led to relationships like that
between Lucille Aymond and James Brown and by introducing new measures
to prevent accidental unions similar to the one between "white" Cyril Sunseri
and "Negro" Verna Cassagne. Significantly, many of the new statutes, includ-
ing the law determining eligibility for a marriage certificate, placed a much
heavier emphasis on the legal designation of race, requiring an official state
birth certificate, with seal, designating the applicant's race. In 1955, the state
legislature made official documentation of race a requirement for public
school registration. In 1958, it became mandatory for marriage license appli-
cations. Stoked by massive resistance, the state's attention to the law of racial
identity intensified in the decade prior to Loving v. Virginia. 103
 Miscegenation 223

In keeping with Louisiana's new segregation laws, in 1957 the New

Orleans Board of Health introduced a working "race list" of surnames
known to the board as historically "Negro," against which all requests for
marriage licenses and other documents were to be double-checked for racial
accuracy.I04 This policy aimed to prevent intentional miscegenation and also
provided the state a new method to prevent inadvertent interracial marriage
and to expose those who, like the members of the Lacoste family, had been
"passing" as white. Although it is impossible to know how many marriage
licenses were denied as a result, the staff of the board of health were notori-
ously thorough, conducting extensive genealogical research, even in records
out of the state. Between 1957 and 1965, Louisiana court records indicate
that a minimum of 4,720 applications for certified copies of birth certifi-
cates, undoubtedly many from engaged couples seeking a marriage license,
were "flagged" for further inquiry and held back by the board because of
questions about race. On a peak day, the board of health office in New
Orleans would process as many as seven hundred requests for docu-
ments. IOS If a question about race arose, the deputy registrar and office staff
simply refused to issue a marriage license. By interposing themselves
between men and women who, until the 1950s, would have identified each
other as members of the same race and might have been able to marry, the
administrators of the law actually introduced a much stricter application of
the antimiscegenation laws. In doing so, the board began to compensate for
many of the law's weaknesses and, it could be argued, actually contributed
to a substantial redefinition of what comprised miscegenation in marriage.
The new segregation laws also represented a historic turning point in the
construction of race, by enhancing the state's ability to control the terms of
definition in Louisiana. In public schools, for example, where "social evi-
dence" had once prevailed and Cyril Sunseri first met Verna Cassagne, the
state now enacted a screening process for all pupils and required for entry
an official birth certificate designating race. I06 Therefore, such records per-
mitted state officials not only to enforce customary segregation but also to
enforce segregation laws according to a strict legal definition of black and
white. Rigorous bureaucratic procedures also allowed the state to make
such determinations of race first and thus circumvent the usual social
process of racial definition by imposing stricter separation between those
people it chose to define as white or black. In the 1960s, the board's defend-
ers argued that race was not "an accidental quality which can be acquired
by association with other races ... through fraud, misrepresentation and
deceit." It was "substance of the being, an inherited trait, acquired from
ancestry genetically."lo7
As this examination of miscegenation case law has demonstrated, how-
ever, such definitions had not always prevailed in Louisiana. For the first half
of the twentieth century, race was, in spite of the one-drop designation,
"known" as it was brokered, negotiated, tested, and asserted in day-to-day
life between individuals. The state held that there was a meaningful differ-
ence between being "known as" one race and "legally" belonging to a racial
224 Michelle Brattain

category, but case studies of miscegenation prior to the 1960s reveal the
inability, and perhaps unwillingness in some cases, of ordinary folks to make
such distinctions when they courted, became engaged, or simply had sex. In
the guise of other relationships, some Louisiana couples like J. W. Jones and
Amanda Kyle and James Brown and Lucille Aymond circumvented the law's
intent. But even when it came to conventional and legally sanctioned rela-
tionships like marriage, the successful separation of races depended upon the
"proper" outcome of countless situations and personal exchanges in school
admissions, housing rentals, hotel registrations, voter registrations, the
streets, workplaces, bars, dance halls, and all other public spaces.
The small numbers of miscegenation prosecutions in the twentieth cen-
tury may indicate that Louisianans accepted prohibitions on sexual rela-
tionships with people socially defined as racially different, but there are also
suggestions that Marcus Christian's hunches were probably right.
Antimiscegenation law repeatedly failed. As Eva Saks has argued, antimis-
cegenation law has historically been "committed to the separation of looked
like (possession of whiteness without legal title to it) from was (good title to
whiteness)."108 The many witnesses called on behalf of miscegenation
proceedings-and undoubtedly an even greater number of betrothed who
never appeared in court-repeatedly demonstrated the failure of the people
to uphold or respect that commitment. In doing so, ordinary Louisianans
not only crafted and enforced their own definition of acceptable marriages,
but also became the primary, if only temporary, architects of the construc-
tion of race at mid-century.

Notes
Ms. Brattain is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University.
1. "Sheep Goats and Passer Pour Blanches," unpublished manuscript by Marcus
Christian, Folder "Ebony Magazine research re passe pour blanc," Box 12, Series
XIII.l: Historical Manuscripts, Marcus Bruce Christian Papers (Special Collections,
Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans; hereinafter cited as Christian
Papers). On Christian, see Marilyn S. Hessler, "Marcus Christian: The Man and His
Collection," Louisiana history 28 (Winter 1987-1988): 37-55; and Jerah Johnson,
"Marcus B. Christian and the WPA History of Black People in Louisiana," Louisiana
history 20 (Winter 1979-1980): 113-15. I would like to thank Jennifer Gonzalez for
her research assistance and Andrew Milne, Krystyn Moon, and the anonymous read-
ers for the Journal of Southern history for their criticisms and suggestions.
2. Christian saved the clipping of an August 22, 1959, death notice for a man named
Ernest Joubert and wrote to himself "Mercy Hospital is white all white. Check"; on a
clipping of the obituaries dated August 23, 1959, he editorialized: "Those who notice
a Negro 'passing' remember him best who know him longer. No Ernest Joubert listed
here??? Bakay-Baham??? Private burial? No Joubert listed in next day's death in
Picayune, also"; on a clipping dated September 8, 1959, Christian circled the name
"Joubert" in an ad for a "colored" apartment and wrote to himself: "The man who
died, Sr.?" See Christian's clippings from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, dated
(handwritten on each clipping) August 22, August 23, and September 8, 1859, in Folder
"January-July 1960," Box 16, all in Series VI: Clippings, Christian Papers; emphasis
 Miscegenation 225

appears in originals (as underlining). For the 1960 photograph of the fiftieth-
anniversary celebration, see a clipping dated January 28, 1960, in the same folder.
3. Interracial marriage was prohibited by both French and Spanish colonial authorities
in Louisiana. American lawmakers maintained that prohibition, outlawing interracial
marriage in 1808. More detail on the legal history of interracial sex follows below. For
a discussion of the myths of racial purity in Louisiana, see Virginia R. Dominguez,
White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ,
1986), 185-204.
4. See, for example, the Citizens' Council's pamphlet "What is the Citizens' Council?
Defender of Racial Integrity, States Rights, and the Constitution," in Folder "Citizen's
Council of Greater New Orleans," Series 1963, Box S63-65, in Mayor Victor H,
Schiro Records (Louisiana Division, City Archives and Special Collections, New
Orleans Public Library; hereinafter cited as New Orleans Public Library); "Citizen
Council Canvass Slated," New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 27,1956, p, 13, col,
1; and Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta (Baton Rouge, LA, 1977),
222-25.
5. The statute under which Brown and Aymond were charged was La, R, S, 14:79
(Article 79 of Louisiana's revised statutes, criminal code). The code and the legal pun-
ishment are cited in State of Louisiana v. James Brown and Lucille Aymond, 236 La,
562, 108 So, 2d 233 (1959), The full text of the statute appears in the published
Louisiana Revised Civil Code, 1128-1130 (1949), Older copies of published Louisiana
statutes (which are no longer valid) are available for research at the Louisiana State
Supreme Court Library in New Orleans.
6. As numerous scholars have argued, miscegenation law is not a mere by-product of
racial ideas; it contributes to the construction and reconstruction of those ideas. See,
for example, Eva Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law," Raritan 8 (Fall 1988):
39-69; Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in
Twentieth-Century America," Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 44-69;
Peter W, Bardaglio, " 'Shamefull Matches': The Regulation of Interracial Sex and
Marriage in the South before 1900," in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing
Boundaries in North American History (New York, 1999), 112-38; and Barbara J.
Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in J, Morgan Kousser and James M,
McPherson, eds,. Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann
Woodward (New York, 1982), 143-77.
7. Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law," 7.
8. A note on the language of race in this essay: Though I regard race as nothing more
than a social construction, as a historian I also recognize the significance, power, and
reality of a racial label or designation in its historical context. Accordingly, I use the
words of contemporaries since that is the meaning or designation that matters histor-
ically. If they describe someone as "Negro," or "colored," so do I. Although some may
find this antiquated racial language of the courts problematic, I think that recognizing
race as a social construction requires a scholar to treat the idea as historically bounded
and thus refuse to translate their words/ideas into seemingly equivalent twenty-first-
century terms. The only change that I have made as a concession to style is to regu-
larize the capitalization of Negro. My approach to the cases concerning racial identity
is similar. I do not make any claims as to what might be the "proper" racial designa-
tion for a person, since I do not believe that there is one. What mattered historically
was the designation that prevailed at the time, either in the court or in a subject's com-
munity more generally. Similarly, if a person was regarded as one race by their peers
and another by the courts, the person did, in a very real sense, possess two racial iden-
tities. Self-identity, social identity, and legal identity were separate entities, and each
possessed very real historical implications that demand that scholars recognize the
validity of each.
226 Michelle Brattain

9. For a discussion of the limitations of legal records, see note 30 and text below.
10. A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff, "Racial Purity and Interracial
Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia," in Werner Sollors, ed.,
Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History. Literature, and Law
(New York, 2000),81-139 (quotation on p. 84).
11. Bardaglio, '''Shamefull Matches,''' 112-38 (quotation on p. 113); Peter
Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage and the Law-An
American History (New York, 2002), 13-38. On the South specifically, see Charles
F. Robinson, Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South
(Fayetteville, Ark., 2003),1-21. On the legal treatment of miscegenation in the colo-
nial period, see also Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious
Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996),
chap. 6; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-
Century South (New Haven, CT, 1997), chap. 2; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in
the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Paul Finkelman, "Crimes of Love, Misdemeanors of
Passion: The Regulation of Race and Sex in the Colonial South," in Catherine
Clinton and Michele Gillespie, eds. The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early
South (New York, 1997), 124-35; Karen A. Getman, "Sexual Control in the
Slaveholding South; The Implementation and Maintenance of a Racial Caste
System," Harvard Women's Law Journal (1984): 121-34; Joel Williamson, New
People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1980), chap. 1;
A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal
Process, vol. I; The Colonial Period (New York, 1978), 44-47, 108, 139,231,269,
286,309; and Higginbotham and Kopytoff, "Racial Purity and Interracial Sex."
12. Robinson, Dangerous Liaisons, 2-4 (quotation on p. 4).
13. Getman, "Sexual Control," 126; Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From
Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1970), chap. 1; Cathetine Clinton, The
Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York, 1982), 87-94;
Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 187-211; Hodes,
White Women, Black Men, 4-5.
14. Robinson provides an instructive overview that reveals the great diversity of state
statutes and enforcement practices. In general, states seem to have acted to preserve
white male authority, as laws were enforced and penalties assigned at white law-
makers' discretion. In practice this meant that most cases punished public relation-
ships between white women and black men. See Robinson, Dangerous Liaisons,
8-20; and Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife, 51-123.
15. Louisiana and South Carolina were exceptions to the law of racial definition, as
South Carolina did not introduce a strict legal definition of blackness and whiteness
and Louisiana still recognized more than two racial categories. F. James Davis, Who
Is Black? One Nation's Definition (University Park, PA, 2001), 34-38. On
Louisiana, see below and Dominguez, White by Definition. On South Carolina, see
Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in
the Old South (New York, 1984). For a twentieth-century example of the relation-
ship between miscegenation law and the law of racial identity, see Victoria E. Bynum,
" 'White Negroes' in Segregated Mississippi; Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the
Law," Journal of Southern History 64 (May 1998): 247-76.
16. For a comparative and synthetic account of such legal conceptions of race and blood,
see Davis, Who Is Black? 1-16, 61-80. For a discussion of the relationship between
"blood" and miscegenation, see Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law"; and
Davis, Who Is Black? 17-30. On Louisiana, see Dominguez, White by Definition,
chap. 3; and Anthony G. Barthelemy, "Light, Bright, Damn Near White; Race, the
 Miscegenation 227

Politics of Genealogy, and the Strange Case of Susie Guillory," in Sybil Kein, ed.,
Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color (Baton Rouge,
LA, 2000), 252-75.
17. According to Jennifer M. Spear, French authorities' preference for intraracial rela-
tionships was motivated by a number of concerns, but primary among them was the
belief that Indian women's sexuality and their willingness to abandon unhappy con-
jugal unions made them ill-suited to the establishment of family and farm, two proj-
ects essential to imperial success in the Louisiana/French system of racial
classification. Spear, " 'They Need Wives'; Metissage and the Regulation of Sexuality
in French Louisiana, 1699-1730," in Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race, 35-59.
18. On the history and development of antimiscegenation law in Louisiana under
French, Spanish, and American authorities, see Charles F. Robinson II, "The
Antimiscegenation Conversation: Love's Legislated Limits (1868-1967)" (PhD diss.,
University of Houston, TX, 1998), 112-15; and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in
Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth
Century (Baton Rouge, LA, 1992).
19. Monique Guillory, "Some Enchanted Evening on the Auction Block: The Cultural
Legacy of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls" (PhD diss., New York University,
1999). On quadroon balls, see also Joan M. Martin, "Plaf{age and the Louisiana
Gens de Couleur Libre: How Race and Sex Defined the Lifestyles of Free Women of
Color," in Keen, ed., Creole, 57-70; Marcus Christian, "Manuscript 19," Folder
"White Men and Negro Women," Box 14, Series XII!.I: Historical Manuscripts,
Christian Papers; Dominguez, White by Definition, 1311; Davis, Who is Black?, 45;
and John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans: 1860-1880 (Chicago, 1973), 17-19.
20. As Robinson notes, this was the general trend, but again, generalizations are defied
by a few exceptional states. Robinson, Dangerous Liaisons, 8-9. Massachusetts
eliminated antimiscegenation law in 1843, and Iowa eliminated it in 1851. Many
state laws continued from the colonial period, as in the case of Virginia and
Maryland. Massachusetts reenacted its colonial law in 1786. Maine and Rhode
Island enacted laws in 1821 and 1798, respectively. For a discussion of the spread of
state laws and specific state statutes in the early national period, see Wallenstein, Tell
the Court I Love My Wife, chap. 3. On Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island,
Virginia, and Maryland, see ibid., 40-41.
21. Robinson, "Antimiscegenation Conversation," 114-17; Harriet Spiller Daggett,
Legal Essays on Family Law (Baton Rouge, LA, 1935),25-29.
22. On the frequent appearance of the subject of interracial sex in mid-nineteenth-
century political discourse, see Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife, 50-63.
23. On the origin of the term miscegenation, see Sidney Kaplan, "The Miscegenation
Issue in the Election of 1864," Journal of Negro History 34 (July 1949): 274-343;
Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 144; and Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My
Wife, 51-52.
24. Robinson, Dangerous Liaisons, 30 (quotation). Robinson notes that Redemption
ushered in many new state antimiscegenation laws, but the impact of these laws was
limited and primarily aimed at formal relationships such as marriage. His survey of
southern legal cases indicates that enforcement was uneven, as white authorities
feared federal intervention and were reluctant to circumscribe interracial sex
between white men and black women, ibid., 49-59.
25. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New
York, 1992), 140 (first quotation), 139 (other quotations). On anxieties related to
women's increased presence in public spheres of work and amusement, see Glenda
Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in
North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), 72-76.
228 Michelle Brattain

26. Paul A. Lombardo, "Medicine, Eugenics, and the Supreme Court: From Coercive
Sterilization to Reproductive Freedom," Journal of Contemporary Health Law and
Policy 13 (Fall 1996): 21 (quotations); Lisa Lindquist Dorr, "Arm in Arm: Gender,
Eugenics and Virginia's Racial Integrity Acts of the 1920s," Journal of Women's
History 11 (Spring 1999): 143; Pascoe "Miscegenation Law"; Paul A. Lombardo,
"Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia, "
V.c. Davis Law Review 21 (Winter 1988-1989): 421-52; Richard B Sherman,
" 'The Last Stand': The Fight for Racial Integrity in Virginia in the 1920s," Journal
of Southern History 54 (February 1988): 69-92.
27. The state's complex and conspiratorial system of policing the practice of self-identi-
fication of race is perhaps the most notorious in modern America. The state's prac-
tices regarding racial identity have received an extraordinary amount of scholarly
and public attention since the early 1980s, when Susan Guillory Phipps, a Louisiana
native, unsuccessfully sued the state to have her racial designation changed to white.
On Phipps, see Barthelemy, "Light, Bright, Damn Near White," 259-66; Calvin
Trillin, "American Chronicles: Black or White," New Yorker, April, 14 1986,
pp. 62-78; and Dominguez, White by Definition, 52-53.
28. Dominguez, White by Definition, 57-62 (first quotation on p. 57; second quotation
on p. 62).
29. Analyzing the evolution of Louisiana's antimiscegenation jurisprudence, Robinson
remarks, "It appears that for Louisiana any abhorrence that whites might have felt
for interracial sex was balanced by the undeniable fact of its frequent occurrence."
"Antimiscegenation Conversation," 128-31 (quotation on p. 128; figures on
p. 131). Civil cases involving miscegenation outnumbered criminal cases throughout
the United States. Peggy Pascoe has systematically examined all appeals court cases
in which miscegenation played a role, and among these cases she found 132 civil and
95 criminal cases. See Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law," 50n15.
30. The paucity of cases at this level also points to a number of problems in relying on legal
records, and appellate cases in particular. Though appellate cases provide quick access to
essential cases that established subsequent case law and, equally important, have the
advantage of being published, indexed, complete with full records of testimony, exhibits,
and briefs, they are in Pascoe's words, "by definition atypical." Chosen for their legal mer-
its, they are in no way a representative sample. Nor can they be used to gauge the fre-
quency of illegal sex or the number of civil suits and local prosecutions related to
miscegenation. Nor, as Randall Kennedy argues, do they reveal much about the influence
of miscegenation law on "the way in which people actually lived their lives," since other
factors like social disapproval and, for black men, the fear of lynching may have been
more significant. For a discussion of appellate cases, see Pascoe, "Miscegenation Laws,"
50n15; and on the limitations of the law as a source, see Randall Kennedy, "The
Enforcement of Anti-Miscegenation Laws," in Sollors, ed., Interracialism, 140-62 (quo-
tation on p. 146). However, in the 1930s, at least one scholar argued that antimiscegena-
tion laws, coupled with social sanctions, may have been a deterrent. Daggett, Legal Essays
on Family Law, especially chap. 1, "The Legal Aspect of Amalgamation in Louisiana."
31. Robinson, "Antimiscegenation Conversation," 128 (quotation); Robinson,
Dangerous Liaisons, 113.
32. Those cases were State v. Treadaway et al., 126 La. 300,52 So. 500 (1910); State v.
Daniel, 141 La. 900, 75 So. 836 (1917); State v. Harris, 150 La. 383, 90 So. 686
(1922); City of New Orleans v. Miller et al., 142 La. 163, 76 So. 596 (1917); State v.
Brown, 236 La. 562, 108 So. 2d. 233 (1959). There are some inherent difficulties in
counting cases, however, including how one decides which cases to count. Some cases
clearly involve miscegenation, such as the divorce cases cited below in which the race
of one party determined the legality of the marriage, but the case itself does not
cite miscegenation or miscegenation law explicitly. In other examples, the case may
 Miscegenation 229

mention miscegenation and in so doing document an accusation or an occurrence of

miscegenation (and therefore the state's knowledge of an accusation of miscegena-
tion), but the case itself involves a different legal matter. A sixth criminal case, State v.
Bertrand et al., 123 La. 575, 49 So. 199 (1909), does cite a couple indicted for crim-
inal miscegenation, but the legal matter in this particular appellate case concerns the
forfeiture of bail, because the defendant, Eugene Bertrand, failed to appear in court.
The case does not mention whether the couple was convicted but does note that the
accused, Eugene Bertrand, was in jail at the time. The miscegenation case would have
been before the district, rather than the appellate court. Another case appearing indi-
rectly in the appellate records is that of Edward and Ezilda Von Buelow, who were
charged with criminal miscegenation, but the case itself concerns an insurance claim.
Edward Von Buelow committed suicide before his trial, and his widow sued her life
insurance company for his benefits. Ezilda Von Buelow, Testamentary Executrix v.
The Life Insurance Company of Virginia, 9 Teiss. 143 (1912).
33. Brief on Behalf of the Defendants, in case files of State of Louisiana v. James Brown
and Lucille Aymond, 236 La. 562, 108 So. 2d 233 (1959), Louisiana Supreme Court
Records (Louisiana Supreme Court Clerk's Office, New Orleans).
34. Quotations from transcript of testimony of David Blalock before the civil district court.
May 29, 1958, Avoyelles Parish; Brief on Behalf of the State of Louisiana, Plaintiff-
Appellee, both in case files of State of Louisiana v. James Brown and Lucille Aymond.
35. Quoted in transcript of testimony of David Blalock, ibid.
36. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, for example, notes that the relationship is often highly per-
sonalized and compared to that between man and wife. See Kanter, Men and Women
of the Corporation (New York, 1977), 76, 86-91.
37. Quoted in transcript of testimony of David Blalock before the civil district court. May
29, 1958, Avoyelles Parish; Brief on Behalf of the State of Louisiana, Plaintiff-
Appellee, both in case files of State of Louisiana v. James Brown and Lucille Aymond.
38. Brown and Aymond confessions, as cited in Brief on Behalf of the Defendants, in case
files of State of Louisiana v. James Brown and Lucille Aymond.
39. State of Louisiana v. James Brown and Lucille Aymond, 236 La. at 567.
40. Brief on Behalf of the Defendants, in case files State of Louisiana v. James Brown and
Lucille Aymond.
41. La R.S. 14:79 as cited in State of Louisiana v. James Brown and Lucille Aymond.
42. State of Louisiana v. James Brown and Lucille Aymond, 236 La. at 569 (first and
second quotations) and 575 (third quotation).
43. On the creation of the myth of white female purity, see Hodes, White Women, Black
Men, 5, 160-61, 177, 181, 186, 197-202,261-25. Hodes links the evolution of
white beliefs about interracial sex, white women's purity, and black men's sexual pre-
dation to escalating violence against black men. Ibid., 178-208.
44. Andrea D. Perez et al. v. W. G. Sharp, 32 Cal. 2d 711,198 P. 2d 17 (1948) ruled that
California's laws prohibiting marriages between whites and members of other racial
groups were invalid. In the case, Perez, a "white" woman, and Sylvester Davis, a
"Negro" man, were denied license to marry by the Los Angeles clerk of court.
However, California did not remove the antimiscegenation law from the California
Civil Code until 1959. On Perez, see Pascoe "Miscegenation Law," 61-63; and Leti
Volpp, "American Mestizo: Filipinos and Antimiscegenation Laws in California,"
v.c. Davis Law Review 33 (Summer 2000): 824.
45. See for example. New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 7, 1959; and Christian's clip-
pings from the Times-Picayune dated (handwritten on the clippings) October 18,
January 28, May 5, and May 26, 1959, in Folder "Jan-June 1959," Box 14; and
September 11, 1960, in Folder "July-Dec 1960," Box 16, both boxes in Series VI:
Clippings, Christian Papers.
230 Michelle Brattain

46. On Dupas see Michelle Brattain, "Passing, Racial Boundaries, and the Social
Construction of Race in Twentieth Century New Orleans," paper presented at con-
ference entitled "Race, Place, and the American Experience," Tuscaloosa, AL,
March 10, 2002; and "Miscegenation Charges Denied," New Orleans Times-
Picayune, July 12, 1956, p. 5, col. 5.
47. On the demonization of black male sexuality in the twentieth century, see Jacquelyn
Dowd Hall, " 'The Mind that Bums in Each Body'; Women, Rape, and Racial
Violence," in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York, 1983), 328-49; Randall Kennedy,
Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage. Identity, and Adoption (New York, 2003),
189-200; and James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York, 1994). Bryant
Simon notes that rumor played a significant and unique role in the way whites talked
about racial issues that they otherwise dared not confront. See Simon's new intro-
duction to Howard W. Odum, Race and Rumors of Race . .. (Baltimore, MD, 1997;
originally published in 1943), viii-ix.
48. For an extended discussion of the court's treatment of concubinage, see Succession of
Lannes, 187 La. 17,40 (quotation), 174 So. 94 (1936).
49. See Christian, unpublished manuscript chapter titled "White men, Negro women,"
p. 202, in Folder "White men, Negro Women," Box 14, Series XIII: Historical
Manuscripts, Christian Papers.
50. Every case that I found concerned a white man and a black woman. Presumably the
same sorts of disguises might have hidden relationships between black men and
white women, although black female employees more typically held jobs that would
have required them to live in a white household. On black women's household
employment, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women,
Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985); Elizabeth
Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington,
D.C, 1910-1940 (Washington, DC, 1994); Brenda Clegg Gray, Black Female
Domestics During the Depression in New York City, 1930-1940 (New York, 1993);
and Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's lives and Labors
after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1997).
51. Jones et al. v. Kyle, 168 La. 728, 733 (first, second, and third quotations), 735 (other
quotations), 123 So. 306 (1929). In determining the "open" or "secret" status of the
relationship between Jones and Kyle, the state relied upon the decision in Succession
of Jahraus, 114 La. 456, 38 So. 417 (1905), which provided an extended discussion
of the legal history of this distinction from the original French law to the state of
Louisiana's civil code and Louisiana case law up to 1905. As the court explained in
Jahraus, the framers of the Louisiana Civil Code had two concerns. They wished to
discourage "unseemly scandals which resulted from permitting scrutiny into the pri-
vate lives of people who were dead and no longer able to defend themselves," but
they also wished "in the interests of public morals, of making some distinction
between people who lived together as man and wife under the solemn sanction of
marriage, and those who maintained practically the same status, openly and publicly,
without the sanction of marriage." Succession of Jahraus, 114 La. at 462. See also
Succession of Lannes, 187 17, which provides another extended discussion of the
history of the law regarding "open concubinage" and its intent to discourage public
immorality.
52. Jones et al. v. Kyle, 168 La. at 735.
53. See also, for example, the case of Hodges' Heirs v. Kelt et al., 125 La. 87,51 So. 77
(1910). In Hodges, the dispute over the estate of John E. Hodges resulted from the
long-term relationship between Hodges, white, and his partner, Eliza Kline, Negro,
who lived with him as an employee for nearly thirty years. In his will, Hodges
 Miscegenation 231

identified Kline as "my true and faithful servant who has been in my employ for the
last 28 years" (p. 94), but he left his entire estate to Kline and their seven children.
54. See Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the
South 1890-1940 (New York, 1998), 94-114.
55. See various clippings in Series VI: Clippings from American and English
Publications, Christian Papers.
56. Louisiana had two bureaus of vital statistics, one serving New Orleans and the other
serving the rest of the state.
57. See, for example, the appeals recorded in Minutes of the Board of Health, bound vol-
ume. New Orleans Health Department Records (New Orleans Public Library);
Naomi Drake v. Department of Health, City of New Orleans Civil Service
Commission, Appeal No. 391, in Civil Service Department Minutes, Classified City
Employees, 1965, microfilm AI300, roll #66-155 (New Orleans Public Library).
58. On whiteness and law, see Ian Haney Lopez. White by Law: The Legal Construction
of Race (New York, 1996); Davis, Who is Black? Cheryl 1. Harris, "Whiteness as
Property," Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993): 1707-91. Kimberly Crenshaw
et aI., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement
(New York, 1995); and Richard Delgado, ed., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting
Edge (Philadelphia, 1995). On New Orleans see Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies,
324-25; Dominguez, White by Definition; Paul Finkelman, "The Crime of Color,"
Tulane Law Review 67 (June 1993): 2063-112; Raymond T. Diamond and Robert J.
Cottrol, "Codifying Caste: Louisiana's Racial Classification Scheme and the
Fourteenth Amendment," Loyola Law Review 29 (Spring 1983): 255-85; and Robert
Westley, "First-Time Encounters: 'Passing' Revisited and Demystification as a Critical
Practice," Yale Law and Policy Review 18 (2000): 297.
59. Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law"; Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law."
60. State v. Treadaway et al., 126 La. 300, 301 (second and third quotations), 52 So. 500
(1910). The law cited in Treadaway is section 1 of Act No. 87 of 1908. Quotations
are taken from the text of the Treadaway decision to indicate the court's technical
language for racial identities. Octave Treadaway's companion is identified as
Josephine Lightell in the case file of State v. Octave Treadaway et al., Louisiana
Supreme Court Records, 1813-1920 (Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library,
University of New Orleans).
61. Dominguez, White by Definition, 31-32 (quotation on p. 32). See also Christian,
editorial notes, undated. Folder "Ebony Magazine research re passe pour blanc,"
Box 12, Series XIII. 1: Historical Manuscripts, Christian Papers.
62. Dominguez, White by Definition, 30-38.
63. Sunseri v. Cassagne, 191 La. 209, 185 So. 1 (1938). On the legal significance of this
standard, see Diamond and Cottrol, "Codifying Caste."
64. Brief on Behalf of the State of Louisiana, Plaintiff-Appellee, in case files of State of
Louisiana v. James Brown and Lucille Aymond.
65. Sunseri v. Cassagne, 191 La. at 211 (quotation); Sunseri v. Cassagne, 195 La. 19, 196
So. 7 (1940); Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law."
66. See transcript of testimony of Cyril Cassagne, Case No 219-350, Civil District Court
Orleans Parish, 1936, included in case files of Sunseri v. Cassagne, 191 La. 209,
Louisiana Supreme Court Records (Louisiana Supreme Court Clerk's Office).
67. Sunseri v. Cassagne, 191 La. at 214.
68. Brief on behalf of Verna Cassagne, included in case files of Sunseri v. Cassagne.
The status ofIndians as white people or persons of color changed over time. In 1810,
the superior court in the territory of Orleans decided in Adelte v. Beauregard that
Indians were considered persons of color. Marriage between whites and Indians was
illegal until Louisiana's antimiscegenation law was repealed in 1870. In 1894, when
232 Michelle Brattain

antimiscegenation laws were reenacted, Indians were still classified as persons of

color and therefore not permitted to marry whites. In 1920, state law declared mar-
riage between Indians and persons "colored and black" miscegenation, and after
that Indians were treated as not "colored." Virginia Dominguez points out that in
the 1930s the attorney general was "explicitly stating that marriage between white
persons and Indians was not prohibited ... " For a full account, see Dominguez,
White by Definition, 34. Given that marriage between whites and Indians or whites
and persons of color was prohibited in 1837, in theory Fanny Ducre should not have
been able to marry Leander Ducre if she was identified as either an Indian or a per-
son of color, but the record does not explain the circumstances of the marriage.
69. Petition and Affidavit from Cyril P. Sunseri v. Verna Cassagne, No 219-350, Civil
District Court, Parish of Orleans, included in case files of Sunseri v. Cassagne. See
also the transcript of the testimony of Stella Cassagne before the civil district court,
ibid.
70. The nine quotations (in order) are from transcripts of the testimony of Toussaint
Ducre; Marie Atlow; Rose Green Ducre; C. Harry Culbertson; Marie Atlow; Marie
Atlow; Marie Atlow; Mary Parker; Rene Pierre, all before the civil district court,
ibid.
71. Transcript of testimony of Mary Parker before the civil district court, ibid.
72. The court, in transcript of testimony of Mary Parker before the civil district court,
ibid.
73. The court (second and third quotations) and Rose Green Ducre (first quotation), in
transcript of testimony of Rose Green Ducre before the civil district court, ibid.
74. Transcript of testimony of P. Henry Lanause before the civil district court, ibid.
75. Transcript of testimony of Rene Pierre before the civil district court, ibid.
76. Transcript of testimony of Rose Green Ducre before the civil district court, ibid.
77. Transcript of testimony of Mrs. Emma Villarrubia, registrar of Lacombe, before the
civil district court, ibid
78. Transcript of testimony of Marie Atlow before the civil district court,ibid.
79. Transcript of testimony of Pauline Roubion before the civil district court, ibid.
80. Transcript of testimony of Cyril Sunseri before the civil district court, ibid.
81. Transcript of testimony of Mrs. George Obitz before the civil district court, ibid.
82. Sunseri v. Cassagne, 195 La. 19 (1938). Quotation from Transcript of testimony of
Verna Cassagne before the civil district court, included in case files of Sunseri v.
Cassagne.
83. Sunseri v. Cassagne, 191 La. at 222 (first quotation); Sunseri v. Cassagne, 195 La. at
21(third quotation), 27 (second quotation).
84. Joseph G. Tregle Jr., "Creoles and Americans," in Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph
Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge.
1992), 134-35 (first quotation on p. 135), 139 (second quotation).
85. Tregle, "Creoles and Americans," 139 (quotations), 172-81.
86. On the "Creole controversy," see Dominguez, White by Definition, 149-81 (quota-
tions on p. 159).
87. Sunseri v. Cassagne, 195 La. at 22 (first quotation); Diamond and Cottrol,
"Codifying Caste," 282 (second quotation). Raymond T. Diamond and Robert J.
Cottrol have argued that the state's racial classification system served primarily
to prevent a person "labeled black because of heredity" from escaping such
categorization. See Diamond and Cottrol, "Codifying Caste," 281-85 (quotation
on p. 282).
88. Villa V. Lacoste et at., 213 La. 654, 35 So. 2d 419 (1948). When Lacoste sued Villa
for support, he answered her suit by attacking the marriage as null and void because
she was "colored." The circumstances surrounding the case are explained in the Brief
 Miscegenation 233

on behalf of Villa, March 13, 1948, in case files of Villa v. Lacoste et al., 213 La.
654,35 So. 2d 419 (1948), Louisiana Supreme Court Records (Louisiana Supreme
Court Clerk's Office).
89. Quotation is from transcript of testimony of Mr. Prudhomme, deputy recorder,
before the civil district court, included in case files of Villa v. Lacoste et at.
Apparently the issue had also appeared in civil district court on a number of occa-
sions, according to Lacoste's attorney. See brief on behalf of Josephine Lacoste,
March 29, 1948, included in case files of Villa v. Lacoste et al.
90. Although the United States had a considerable number of Filipino immigrants in
1948, the majority of them resided in the West, with more than three-quarters of
them living in California. According to U.S. law, Filipinos were U.S. nationals, free
to migrate between the Philippines and the U.S. but ineligible for naturalization.
U.S. policy had, since 1790, limited naturalization to "free white persons" with the
exception of African Americans and African immigrants, who were naturalized, by
the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Naturalization Act of 1870, respec-
tively. Passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 promised the Philippines inde-
pendence, immediately restricted Filipino immigration, and ultimately intended to
exclude all Filipino immigrants after independence, which was eventually granted
in 1946. In 1946, passage of the Luce-Celler Bill provided naturalization rights to
Filipinos who had migrated prior to 1934 but placed a quota on future immigra-
tion. Megumi Dick Osumi, "Asians and California's Anti-Miscegenation Laws," in
Nobuya Tsuchida et aI., eds., Asian and Pacific American Experiences: Women's
Perspectives (Minneapolis, 1982), 1-30; Barbara M. Posadas, The Filipino
Americans (Westport, 1999), 23-27 (quotation on p. 23), 35-36. On race and
naturalization, see also Haney Lopez, White by Law.
91. Brief on behalf of Josephine Lacoste, March 29,1948, included in case files of Villa
v. Lacoste et al.
92. ibid.
93. Nine states had laws prohibiting marriage between "Malays," the racial group to
which Filipinos were traditionally assigned, and "whites." Arizona, California,
Maryland, Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming had statutes specifically
prohibiting white-Malay marriages. Georgia and Virginia laws on marriage did not
specifically prohibit Malay-white marriages, but those states did prohibit marriages
between whites and nonwhites and in other laws defined Malays as not white. See
"American Mestizo," 800-1; and Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The
Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago, 2001), 38-41.
94. Brief on behalf of Josephine Lacoste, March 29,1948, included in case files of Villa
v. Lacoste et al.
95. Transcript of testimony of Raymond Cabilash, ibid.
96. Transcript of testimony of Josephine Lacoste, ibid.
97. Transcript of testimony of Charles Villa, ibid.
98. For a more contemporary discussion of the racial status of Filipinos, see Emory S.
Bogardus, "What Race Are Filipinos?" Sociology and Social Research 16
(January-February 1932): 274-79.
99. Transcript of testimony of Stephen Villa; and transcript of testimony of Mrs. John
J. Gilbert, included in case files of Villa v. Lacoste et al.
100. Transcript of testimony of Josephine Lacoste, ibid.
101. Villa v. Lacoste et al., 213 La. 654.
102. See Brattain, "Passing, Racial Boundaries, and the Social Construction of Race in
Twentieth Century New Orleans"; and Jeansonne, Leander Perez, 233-35.
103. On schools, see Marcus Christian's notes on Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board,
Folder "Bush v. Orleans," Box 5, Series XI, Historical source materials, Christian
234 Michelle Brattain

Papers; and New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 8, 1955, p. 26, col. 3. The
new requirements for marriage licenses were implemented by Act 160, House Bill
596, approved July 1, 1958.
104. On the race list, see Dominguez, White by Definition, 36-37; Trillin, "American
Chronicles," 62-78; and Brattain, "Passing, Racial Boundaries, and the Social
Construction of Race in Twentieth Century New Orleans."
105. Naomi M. Drake v. Dept. of Health (1965), appeal from the Civil Service
Commission of the City of New Orleans, no. 391, transcript of hearings, vol. 1,
p. 16, Civil Service Files (New Orleans Public Library).
106. On the requirement of birth certificates for school registration, see New Orleans
Times-Picayune, September 8, 1955, p. 26, col. 3.
107. Brief on behalf of Drake, in Naomi M. Drake v. Dept of Health (1965), transcript
of hearings, vol. 3, pp. 722-23, Civil Service Files.
108. Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law," 58.
 Chapter 10

The Long Civil Rights Movement and the

Political Uses of the Past

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

From The Journal ofAmerican History

The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing
America to face all its interrelated flaws-racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is
exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole struaure of our society . .. and suggests that
radical reconstruaion of society is the real issue to be faced.

-Martin Luther King Jr.

Stories are wonderful things. And they are dangerous.

-Thomas King

The civil rights movement circulates through American memory in forms

and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly
contested. Civil rights memorials jostle with the South's ubiquitous monu-
ments to its Confederate past. Exemplary scholarship and documentaries
abound, and participants have produced wave after wave of autobio-
graphical accounts, at least two hundred to date. Images of the movement
appear and reappear each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and during
Black History Month. Yet remembrance is always a form of forgetting,
and the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement-distilled from
history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and
embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and
various artifacts of mass culture-distorts and suppresses as much as it
reveals. 1
Centering on what Bayard Rustin in 1965 called the "classical" phase of
the struggle, the dominant narrative chronicles a short civil rights movement
236 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

that begins with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, proceeds
through public protests, and culminates with the passage of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 2 Then comes the decline.
After a season of moral clarity, the country is beset by the Vietnam War,
urban riots, and reaction against the excesses of the late 1960s and the
1970s, understood variously as student rebellion, black militancy, feminism,
busing, affirmative action, or an overweening welfare state. A so-called
white backlash sets the stage for the conservative interregnum that, for good
or ill, depending on one's ideological persuasion, marks the beginning of
another story, the story that surrounds us now.
Martin Luther King Jr. is this narrative's defining figure-frozen in 1963,
proclaiming "I have a dream" during the march on the Mall. Endlessly
reproduced and selectively quoted, his speeches retain their majesty yet lose
their political bite. We hear little of the King who believed that "the racial
issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem"
and who attacked segregation in the urban North. Erased altogether is the
King who opposed the Vietnam War and linked racism at home to mili-
tarism and imperialism abroad. Gone is King the democratic socialist who
advocated unionization, planned the Poor People's Campaign, and was
assassinated in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers' strike. 3
By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes,
to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objectives, the mas-
ter narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement. It
ensures the status of the classical phase as a triumphal moment in a larger
American progress narrative, yet it undermines its gravitas. It prevents one
of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking
effectively to the challenges of our time.
While the narrative I have recounted has multiple sources, this essay
emphasizes how the movement's meaning has been distorted and reified by
a New Right bent on reversing its gains. I will then trace the contours of
what I take to be a more robust, more progressive, and truer story-the
story of a "long civil rights movement" that took root in the liberal and rad-
ical milieu of the late 1930s, was intimately tied to the "rise and fall of the
New Deal Order," accelerated during World War II, stretched far beyond the
South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and in the 1960s and
1970s inspired a "movement of movements" that "def[ies] any narrative of
collapse. ,,4
Integral to that more expansive story is the dialectic between the move-
ment and the so-called backlash against it, a wall of resistance that did not
appear suddenly in the much-maligned 1970s, but arose in tandem with the
civil rights offensive in the aftermath of World War II and culminated under
the aegis of the New Right. The economic dimensions of the movement lie
at the core of my concerns, and throughout I will draw attention to the
interweavings of gender, class, and race. In this essay, however, racial narra-
tives and dilemmas will take center stage, for, as Lani Guinier and Gerald
 Political Uses of the Past 237

Torres suggest, "Those who are racially marginalized are like the miner's
canary: their distress is the first sign of a danger that threatens us all."5
A desire to understand and honor the movement lies at the heart of the
rich and evolving literature on the 1950s and early 1960s, and that era's
chroniclers have helped endow the struggle with an aura of cultural legiti-
macy that both reflects and reinforces its profound legal, political, and social
effects. By placing the world-shaking events of the classical phase in the
context of a longer story, I want to buttress that representational project and
reinforce the moral authority of those who fought for change in those years.
At the same time, I want to make civil rights harder. Harder to celebrate as a
natural progression of American values. Harder to cast as a satisfying
morality tale. Most of all, harder to simplify, appropriate, and contain. 6

The Political Uses of Racial Narratives

The roots of the dominant narrative lie in the dance between the move-
ment's strategists and the media's response. In one dramatic protest after
another, civil rights activists couched their demands in the language of dem-
ocratic rights and Christian universalism; demonstrated their own
respectability and courage; and pitted coercive nonviolence against guns,
nightsticks, and fists. Played out in the courts, in legislative chambers, in
workplaces, and in the streets, those social dramas toppled the South's system
of disfranchisement and de jure or legalized segregation by forcing the hand
of federal officials and bringing local governments to their knees. The mass
media, in turn, made the protests "one of the great news stories of the mod-
ern era," but they did so very selectively. Journalists' interest waxed and
waned along with activists' ability to generate charismatic personalities
(who were usually men) and telegenic confrontations, preferably those in
which white villains rained down terror on nonviolent demonstrators dressed
in their Sunday best. Brought into American living rooms by the seductive new
medium of television and replayed ever since, such scenes seem to come out of
nowhere, to have no precedents, no historical roots. To compound that distor-
tion, the national press's overwhelmingly sympathetic, if misleading, coverage
changed abruptly in the mid-1960s with the advent of black power and black
uprisings in the urban North. Training a hostile eye on those developments, the
cameras turned away from the South, ignoring the southern campaign's evolv-
ing goals, obscuring interregional connections and similarities, and creating a
narrative breach between what people think of as "the movement" and the
ongoing popular struggles of the late 1960s and the 1970s.7
Early studies of the black freedom movement often hewed closely to the
journalistic "rough draft of history," replicating its judgments and trajectory.
More recent histories, memoirs, and documentaries have struggled to loosen
its hold. 8 Why, then, has the dominant narrative seemed only to consolidate
its power? The answer lies, in part, in the rise of other storytellers- the
architects of the New Right, an alliance of corporate power brokers,
238 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

old-style conservative intellectuals, and "neoconservatives" (disillusioned

liberals and socialists turned cold war hawks).
The Old Right, North and South, had been on the wrong side of the revo-
lution, opposing the civil rights movement and reviling its leaders in the name
of property rights, states' rights, anticommunism, and the God-given, biolog-
ical inferiority of blacks. Largely moribund by the 1960s, the conservative
movement reinvented itself in the 1970s, first by incorporating neoconserva-
tives who eschewed old-fashioned racism and then by embracing an ideal of
formal equality, focusing on blacks' ostensible failings, and positioning itself
as the true inheritor of the civil rights legacy.9 Like all bids for discursive and
political power, this one required the warrant of the past, and the dominant
narrative of the civil rights movement was ready at hand. Reworking that nar-
rative for their own purposes, these new "color-blind conservatives" ignored
the complexity and dynamism of the movement, its growing focus on
structural inequality, and its "radical reconstruction" goals. Instead, they
insisted that color blindness-defined as the elimination of racial classifica-
tions and the establishment of formal equality before the law-was the move-
ment's singular objective, the principle for which King and the Brown
decision, in particular, stood. They admitted that racism, understood as indi-
vidual bigotry, did exist-"in the distant past" and primarily in the South-a
concession that surely would have taken the Old Right by surprise. lO But after
legalized Jim Crow was dismantled, such irrationalities diminished to insignif-
icance. In the absence of overtly discriminatory laws and with the waning of
conscious bias, American institutions became basically fair. Free to compete in
a market-driven society, Mrican Americans thereafter bore the onus of their
own failure or success. If stark group inequalities persisted, black attitudes,
behavior, and family structures were to blame. The race-conscious remedies
devised in the late 1960s and 1970s to implement the movement's victories,
such as majority-minority voting districts, minority business set-asides, affir-
mative action, and two-way busing, were not the handiwork of the authentic
civil rights movement at all. Foisted on an unwitting public by a "liberal elite"
made up of judges, intellectuals, and government bureaucrats, those policies
not only betrayed the movement's original goals, they also had little effect on
the economic progress blacks enjoyed in the late 1960s and 1970s, which was
caused not by grassroots activism or governmental intervention but by imper-
sonal market forces. In fact, the remedies themselves became the cause of our
problems, creating resentment among whites, subverting self-reliance among
blacks, and encouraging "balkanization" when nationalism and assimilation
should be our goals. ll It was up to color-blind conservatives to restore the
original purpose of civil rights laws, which was to prevent isolated acts of
wrongdoing against individuals, rather than, as many civil rights activists and
legal experts claimed, to redress present, institutionalized manifestations of
historical injustices against blacks as a group.u
Germinated in well-funded right-wing think tanks and broadcast to the
general public, this racial narrative had wide appeal, in part because it
 Political Uses of the Past 239

conformed to white, middle-class interests and flattered national vanities

and in part because it resonated with ideals of individual effort and merit
that are widely shared. The American creed of free-market individualism,
in combination with the ideological victories of the movement (which
ensured that white supremacy must "hide its face"), made the rhetoric of
color blindness central to the "war of ideas" initiated by the New Right in
the 1970s. With Ronald Reagan's presidential victory in 1980, and even
more so after the Republican sweep of Congress in 1994, that rhetoric
entrenched itself in public policy. Dovetailing with the retreat from race-spe-
cific remedies among centrist liberals, it crossed traditional political bound-
aries, and it now shapes the thinking of "a great many people of good
will." 13
Clearly, the stories we tell about the civil rights movement matter; they
shape how we see our own world. "Facts" must be interpreted, and those
interpretations-narrated by powerful storytellers, portrayed in public
events, acted upon in laws and policies and court decisions, and grounded
in institutions-become primary sources of human action. Those who
aspire to affect public opinion and policy and thus to participate in "the
endless struggle over our collective destiny" must always ask themselves not
only "which stories to advance, contest, and accept as 'true,' " but also how
to discipline those stories with research and experience and to advance them
with power. In the world of symbolic politics, the answers to those questions
determine who will prevaiI.14
In that spirit, I will turn now to a story of my own-the story of the long
civil rights movement and of the resistance to it. Throughout, I will draw on
the work of a wide range of historians, tying together stories usually told sep-
arately in order to alter common understandings of the black freedom struggle
(and of how we arrived at the dilemmas of the new millennium) in at least six
major ways. First, this new, longer and broader narrative undermines the
trope of the South as the nation's "opposite other," an image that southernizes
racism and shields from scrutiny both the economic dimensions of southern
white supremacy and the institutionalized patterns of exploitation, segrega-
tion, and discrimination in other regions of the country-patterns that sur-
vived the civil rights movement and now define the South's racial landscape as
well. Second, this narrative emphasizes the gordian knot that ties race to class
and civil rights to workers' rights. Third, it suggests that women's activism
and gender dynamics were central both to the freedom movement and to the
backlash against it. Fourth, it makes visible modern civil rights struggles in the
North, Midwest, and West, which entered a new phase with the turn to black
nationalism in the mid-1960s but had begun at least a quarter century before.
Fifth, it directs attention to the effort to "make use of the reforms won by the
civil rights movement" in the 1970s, after the national movement's alleged
demise.15 And finally, it construes the Reagan-Bush ascendancy not simply as
a backlash against the "movement of movements" of the late 1960s and
1970s, but as a development with deep historical roots.
240 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

The Long Backlash

Two great internal migrations gave rise both to the long civil rights
movement and to the interests and ideologies that would ultimately feed the
most telling resistance to it: the exodus of African Americans to the cities of
the South, North, and West precipitated by the collapse of the southern
sharecropping system and the mass suburbanization of whites. Accelerating
during World War II, those vast relocations of people and resources trans-
formed the racial geography of the country. Each responded to and acted on
the other. They were fatefully, although often invisibly, entwined. 16
Gender, class, region, and race-all shaped both migration experiences.
Because discrimination in the North shunted black men into the meanest
factory jobs, women carried the burden of a double day. Relegated mainly
to domestic service, they combined wage earning not only with homemak-
ing but with kin work and social networking, practices that were rooted in
the folk and family traditions of the South, bound neighborhoods together,
and provided the safety net that discriminatory welfare policies denied. Such
networks also helped to blur urban-rural boundaries, ensuring that struggles
in the city and the countryside would be mutually reinforcingY
As rural black folk grappled with the planter-dominated policies and
practices that exploited their labor and drove them from the land, urban
migrants fought to "keep Mississippi out of California" and the "plantation
mentality" out of the cities of the South. 18 Indeed, the resonance of the plan-
tation metaphor for blacks throughout the country suggests the depth and
durability of rural memories and interregional connections. In one sense,
however, the metaphor is misleading. For black migrants who made their way
to the "promised land" found themselves confronting not Mississippi in
California but indigenous forms of discrimination and de facto segregation-
the result not of custom, as "de facto" implies, but of a combination of indi-
vidual choices and governmental policies (some blatant and some race neu-
tral on their face) that had the effect, and often the intent, of barring African
Americans from access to decent jobs, schools, and homes, as well as to the
commercialized leisure spaces that increasingly symbolized "making it in
America" for white ethnics en route to the middle class.
Ironically, New Deal programs helped to erect those racial barriers. In tan-
dem with the higher wages won by the newly empowered unions of the
Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the expansion of the welfare state
mitigated the terrible insecurity of working-class life for blacks and whites
alike. Yet the "gendered" and "raced" imagination of New Deal reformers
also built racial and gender inequality into the very foundation of the modern
state. 19 Those inequalities were intensified by the concessions exacted both by
conservative Republican congressmen and by southern Democrats, who owed
their congressional seniority and thus their domination of key committees to
the South's constricted electorate and one-party rule.
One manifestation of systemic inequality was a two-track welfare system
rooted in a "family wage" ideal that figured the worker as a full-time
 Political Uses of the Past 241

breadwinner who supported children and a dependent, non-wage-earning

wife at home-an ideal from which most people of color were excluded.
When unemployment insurance was enacted in 1935, for example, it did
not extend to agricultural and domestic workers, whom reformers did not
see as independent, full-time breadwinners, and on whom the South's low-
wage economy depended. As a result, 55 percent of all African American
workers and 87 percent of all wage-earning African American women were
excluded from one of the chief benefits of the New Deal. In lieu of such pro-
tections, African Americans were dependent on-and stigmatized by-the
stingy, means-tested programs known as "welfare" today.20
As metropolitan populations exploded, a mad scramble for housing
brought African Americans face to face with another limitation of the New
Deal: white men benefited disproportionately from the G.I. Bill of Rights, a
mammoth social welfare program for returning veterans passed by
Congress at the end of World War II. In combination with an equally ambi-
tious housing program, the G.I. Bill drew aspiring ethnic workers and the
white middle class out of the city, away from black neighbors, and into ever-
expanding suburban rims. Centuries of racial denigration, compounded by
divisions built into the two-track welfare system, predisposed white urban-
ites to fear black migrants. But what came to be known as "white flight"
was caused not just by individual attitudes but also by a panoply of profit-
and government-driven policies. Local zoning boards and highway building
choices equated "black" with "blight," frightening away white buyers and
steering investment away from black urban neighborhoods. Blockbusting
real estate agents stampeded whites into selling cheap and blacks into
buying dear. Redlining banks denied mortgages to African Americans and to
buyers in "mixed" neighborhoods. Most important, the Federal Housing
Administration pursued lending policies that not only favored but practi-
cally mandated racial homogeneity.21
Encouraged by tax incentives, highway building programs, and a desire
to outflank the new unions, factories and businesses moved to the suburbs
as well, eroding the cities' tax base, damaging infrastructure, and eviscerat-
ing municipal services. The growth of segregated suburbs also exacerbated
the trend toward almost complete segregation in urban schools. The prac-
tice of supporting public education through local taxes and the fiercely
guarded divide between urban and suburban school districts, combined
with conscious, racially motivated choices regarding the siting of schools
and the assignment of pupils, relegated black migrants to schools that were
often as separate and as unequal as those they had left behind. 22
This cascading process of migration, job discrimination, suburbaniza-
tion, and race-coded New Deal reform had three major effects. First, over
the course of the 1940s race became increasingly spatialized, rendering
invisible to whites the accumulated race and class privileges that
undergirded what suburbanites came to see as the rightful fruits of their
own labor. Second, the "suburban frontier" spawned a new homeowners'
politics based on low taxes, property rights, neighborhood autonomy, and
242 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

a shrinking sense of social responsibility, all of which became entangled

with racial identity in ways that would prove extremely difficult to undo.23
Finally, African Americans, already burdened by the social and economic
deprivations of slavery and Jim Crow, found themselves disadvantaged by
employment practices and state policies that amounted to affirmative action
for whites. In a society where a home represented most families' single most
important asset, for example, differential access to mortgages and housing
markets and the racial valuation of neighborhoods translated into enor-
mous inequalities. Passed on from generation to generation, those inequali-
ties persist to this day. Short-circuiting the generational accumulation of
wealth and social capital that propelled other ethnic minorities into the
expanding post-World War II middle class, those policies left a legacy of
racial inequality that has yet to be seriously addressed. 24

Southern Strategies
We now have a copious literature on postwar suburbanization and the deep-
ening of segregation in the North and West. But too often, the already seg-
regated, rural, backward South figures in this story only as a footnote or an
exception to the rule. In fact, because southern cities grew up in the age of
New Deal reform, the automobile, and suburban sprawl, the modern South
might better be seen as a paradigm. 25
Looking back from the perspective of the dominant narrative, it is easy to
see a peculiar system of legal segregation as the South's defining feature. But
spatial separation was never the white South's major goal. Black and white
southerners engaged in constant and nuanced interactions, moderated by
personal ties, economic interests, and class and gender dynamics and
marked by cultural exchange. 26 Taking place as they did within a context of
racial hierarchy, those interactions did not diminish segregation's perni-
ciousness and power. Yet given the ubiquity of black-white contact and the
crucial role of blacks as a source of cheap labor, what we think of as the age
of segregation might better be called the age of "racial capitalism," for seg-
regation was only one instrument of white supremacy, and white supremacy
entailed not only racial domination, but also economic practices. Pursued
by an industrial and agricultural oligarchy to aggrandize themselves and
forward a particular development strategy for the region, those practices
involved low taxes, minimal investment in human capital, the separation
and political immobilization of the black and white southern poor, the
exploitation of non-unionized, undereducated black and white labor, and
the patriarchal control of families and local institutions. 27
That strategy created a particularly brutal and openly racialized social
system, especially in the Deep South. But its basic doctrines-racial and
class subordination, limited government regulation, a union-free workplace,
and a racially divided working class-dovetailed seamlessly with an ethic of
laissez-faire capitalism rooted deeply in American soil. 28 This is not to
 Political Uses of the Past 243

minimize regional differences. It is, however, to suggest that the further we

move away from the campaigns that overturned the South's distinctive sys-
tem of state-sponsored segregation, the easier it is to see the broader and
ultimately more durable patterns of privilege and exploitation that were
American, not southern, in their origins and consequences.
Those common patterns meant that the South's postwar prosperity could
narrow regional differences without eliminating racial gaps. Change began
in earnest in the 1940s and accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s, as southern
Democrats, responding selectively to the activist New Deal state (rather
than opposing it, as observers often assume), used their congressional sen-
iority to garner a disproportionate share of defense spending while demand-
ing local and state control over federal programs for housing, hospital
construction, education, and the like. That strategy helped raise wages and
triple regional incomes in the 1940s, but it also blunted federal antidiscrim-
ination efforts. 29 At the same time, southern industrialists, like their coun-
terparts in other regions, reacted to rising wages and to the labor militancy
that followed World War II by installing laborsaving machinery and elimi-
nating the jobs held by blacks, while whites monopolized the new skilled
and white-collar jobs, which demanded qualifications denied to blacks by
both educational inequities and discriminatory practices that barred them
from learning on the job. Thus even as the South prospered, racial disparities
widened. 30
Much of the South's new technical and managerial workforce, more-
over, was imported from the urban North. Before World War II, the chief
goal of most southern politicians was to maintain the South's isolation and
the captive labor supply on which the sharecropping system depended.
Afterward, boosterism became these leaders' raison d'etre and "the selling
of the South" began. Low corporate taxes, low welfare benefits, and
"look-the-other-way environmental policies," coupled with federally
financed highway-building campaigns, attracted northern industry and an
influx of northern-born, Republican-bred branch managers, supervisors,
and technicians. 31 Those newcomers settled with their southern-born
counterparts in class- and race-marked enclaves created by the same osten-
sibly race-neutral public policies that spatialized race in the North. With
mushrooming suburbanization came the attitudes and advantages that
would undergird the South's version of homeowner politics-the politics
of the long backlash everywhere. Richard M. Nixon's "southern strategy"
which attacked welfare, busing, and affirmative action in order to bring
white southerners into the Republican fold, targeted such voters: middle-
class suburbanites, including skilled workers from outside the South and
young families who had come of age after the Brown decision and were
uncomfortable with the openly racist rhetoric of massive resistance.
Aimed also at white workers in the urban North, that strategy helped
make the South a chief stronghold of the Republican Party as over the next
quarter century, the party cast off its moderates and set about dismantling
the New Deal order.32
244 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

The Long Civil Rights Movement

Yet the outcome was not inevitable. It would take many years of astute and
aggressive organizing to bring today's conservative regime to power. It took
such effort because another force also rose from the caldron of the Great
Depression and crested in the 1940s: a powerful social movement sparked by
the alchemy of laborites, civil rights activists, progressive New Dealers, and
black and white radicals, some of whom were associated with the Communist
Party. Robert Korstad calls it "civil rights unionism," Martha Biondi the
"Black Popular Front"; both terms signal the movement's commitment to
building coalitions, the expansiveness of its social democratic vision, and the
importance of its black radical and laborite leadership. A national movement
with a vital southern wing, civil rights unionism was not just a precursor of
the modern civil rights movement. It was its decisive first phase. 33
The link between race and class lay at the heart of the movement's polit-
ical imagination. Historians have depicted the postwar years as the moment
when race eclipsed class as the defining issue of American liberalism. 34 But
among civil rights unionists, neither class nor race trumped the other, and
both were expansively understood. Proceeding from the assumption that,
from the founding of the Republic, racism has been bound up with eco-
nomic exploitation, civil rights unionists sought to combine protection from
discrimination with universalistic social welfare policies and individual
rights with labor rights. For them, workplace democracy, union wages, and
fair and full employment went hand in hand with open, affordable housing,
political enfranchisement, educational equity, and an enhanced safety net,
including health care for alPS
The realization of this vision depended on the answers to two questions.
First, could the black-labor-left coalition reform the social policies forged
during the Great Depression, extending to blacks the social and economic
citizenship the New Deal had provided to an expanding state-subsidized
middle class and an upper echelon of male workers? Second, could the coali-
tion take advantage of the New Deal and the surge of progressive thought
and politics in the American South to break the grip of the southern
oligarchy in the region?36
Extending the New Deal and reforming the South were two sides of the
same coin because seven out of ten African Americans still lived in the for-
mer Confederate states and because conservative southern Democrats pos-
sessed such disproportionate power in Congress. 3? To challenge the
southern Democrats' congressional stranglehold, the movement had to
enfranchise black and white southern workers and bring them into the
house of labor, thus creating a constituency on which the region's emerging
pro-civil rights, prolabor politicians could rely. If the project failed and the
conservative wing of the southern Democratic Party triumphed, the South
would become a magnet for runaway industries and a power base for a
national conservative movement, undercutting the northern bastions of
organized labor and unraveling the New Dea1. 38
 Political Uses of the Past 245

During the 1940s half a million unionized black workers, North and
South, put themselves in the front ranks of the effort. The "Double V"
campaign, for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home; the prola-
bor policies of the Roosevelt administration; the booming economy which
made labor scarce and triggered the biggest jump in black earnings since
emancipation; the militancy of the black- and Left-led unions; the return of
black veterans-all taken together "generated a rights consciousness that
gave working-class black militancy a moral justification in some ways as
powerful as that evoked by [Afro-Christianity] a generation later.,,39
International events deepened and broadened that consciousness. African
Americans and their allies were among the first to grasp the enormity of the
Nazi persecution of the Jews and to drive home the parallels between racism
and anti-Semitism. In so doing, they used revulsion against the Holocaust to
undermine racism at home and to "turn world opinion against Jim Crow."
A "rising wind" of popular anticolonialism, inspired by the national libera-
tion struggles in Africa and Asia that erupted after the war, also legitimized
black aspirations and linked the denial of civil rights at home to the
exploitation of the colonized peoples around the globe as well as to racially
exclusive immigration and naturalization laws. 40
At the same time, Popular Front culture encouraged labor feminism, a
multiclass, union-oriented strand within the women's movement in which
black women played a central role. Women joined the labor movement in
record numbers in the 1940s, and by the end of the decade they had moved
into leadership positions. The labor feminists among them fought for access
to jobs, fair treatment, and expanded social supports within their unions
and on the shop floor. They aimed to "de-gender" the idea of the family
wage by asserting that women too were breadwinners. They also wanted to
transform "the masculine pattern" of work, first by eliminating all invidious
distinctions between male and female workers and then by demanding inno-
vations, such as federally funded child care, that addressed the burdens of
women's double day. Paralleling and reinforcing labor feminism, women in
the Communist movement launched a women's liberation campaign.
Articulated by Claudia Jones, the leading black woman leader in the
Communist Party, and pushed forward by the Congress of American
Women, the concept of the triple oppression of black women-by virtue of
their race, class, and gender-stood at the center of a tradition of left or pro-
gressive feminism that saw women's issues as inseparable from those of race
and class. 41
Spurred by this broad insurgency, as well as by the turn of black leaders
from "parallelism" (the creation of black institutions and the demand for
separate but equal public services) to a push for full inclusion, black politi-
cal activism soared and barriers to economic and political democracy tum-
bled. The Wagner Act and the National War Labor Board helped workers
temper the power of corporations and forward the dream of
workplace democracy that had animated American reform consciousness
since the Progressive Era. In response to pressure from below, led mainly by
246 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, President

Franklin D. Roosevelt established a Fair Employment Practices Committee
(FEPC) in 1941, putting racial discrimination on the national agenda for the
first time since Reconstruction. In 1944 the Supreme Court brought a half
century of acquiescence in political exclusion to an end when it declared
the white primary unconstitutional. Rivaling in importance the later and
more celebrated Brown decision, Smith v. Allwright sparked a major, South-
wide voter registration drive. Other victories included the desegregation of
the military, the outlawing of racial restrictive covenants and segregation in
interstate commerce and graduate education, and the equalization of the
salaries of black and white teachers in some southern states. 42

The Chill of the Cold War

Those breakthroughs contributed to the movement's momentum, but they
also met fierce resistance, as the long backlash accelerated. In the late 1940s,
northern business interests joined conservative southern Democrats in a
drive to roll back labor's wartime gains, protect the South's cheap labor sup-
ply, and halt the expansion of the New Deal. Their weapon of choice was a
mass-based but elite-manipulated anticommunist crusade that would
profoundly alter the cultural and political terrain.
The chief target was New Deal labor law. Like antidiscrimination and
affirmative action programs in the 1960s and 1970s, the FEPC had enraged
the conservative alliance, which defended the employer's right to hire and
fire at will and equated fair hiring practices with quotas. After the war,
probusiness conservatives quashed the campaign for a permanent FEPC, the
chief item on the black-labor-left legislative agenda, in part by framing their
opposition in the powerful new language of the cold war. Sen. Strom
Thurmond of South Carolina, for instance, painted the FEPC as a violation
of the "American" principle of "local self-government" by a "federal police
state" reminiscent of the Soviet Union. By demonizing the Communists in
the labor movement, conservatives also pushed the Taft-Hartley Act
through Congress. Under Taft-Hartley's restrictions, the CIO expelled its
left-wing unions, tempered its fight for social welfare programs that would
benefit the whole working class, and settled for an increasingly bureaucra-
tized system of collective bargaining that secured higher wages and private
welfare protections for its own members, mainly white male workers in
heavy industries. Despite this so-called labor-management accord,
American corporations remained fundamentally hostile toward both unions
and the regulatory state, leaving even the workers who profited from the
constricted collective bargaining system vulnerable to a renewed corporate
offensive in the 1970s and 1980s, an offensive that, in combination with
economic stagnation, de industrialization, and automation, would cripple
the trade-union movement for years to come. 43
To be sure, even as domestic anticommunism helped drive labor to the
right and weaken civil rights unionism's institutional base, it gave civil rights
 Political Uses of the Past 247

advocates a potent weapon: the argument that the United States' treatment
of its black citizens undermined its credibility abroad. At a time when the
State Department was laboring to draw a stark contrast between American
democracy and Soviet terror, win the allegiance of the newly independent
nations of Asia and Africa, and claim leadership of the "free world,"
competition with the Soviet Union gave government officials a compelling
reason to ameliorate black discontent and, above all, to manage the image
of American race relations abroad. As a result, civil rights leaders who were
willing to mute their criticism of American foreign policy and distance
themselves from the Left gained a degree of access to the halls of power they
had never had before. On balance, historians have emphasized the effective-
ness of this strategy and viewed the movement's successes in the 1950s as
"at least in part a product of the Cold War.,,44 Seen through the optic of the
long civil rights movement, however, civil rights look less like a product of
the cold war and more like a casualty.
That is so because antifascism and anticolonialism had already interna-
tionalized the race issue and, by linking the fate of African Americans to
that of oppressed people everywhere, had given their cause a transcendent
meaning. Anticommunism, on the other hand, stifled the social democratic
impulses that antifascism and anticolonialism encouraged, replacing them
with a cold war racial liberalism that, at best, failed to deliver on its prom-
ise of reform (with the partial exception of the judiciary, the federal govern-
ment took no effective action throughout the 1950s) and, at worst, colluded
with the right-wing red scare to narrow the ideological ground on which
civil rights activists could stand. To take just one example: Both left-wing
and centrist black leaders seized the opportunity offered by the 1945 found-
ing of the United Nations (UN) to define the plight of African Americans as
a "human rights" issue, a concept that in UN treaties denoted not just free-
dom from political and legal discrimination but also the right to education,
health care, housing, and employment. Although eager to convince emerg-
ing African nations of America's racial progress, the State Department
blocked that endeavor, insulating the internal affairs of the United States
from the oversight of the UN while carefully separating protected civil
liberties from economic justice and branding the whole campaign for a
robust human rights program a Soviet plot. Thwarted in its efforts, the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
abandoned both economic issues and the battle against segregation in the
North and devoted its considerable resources to clear-cut cases of de jure
segregation in the South, thus severing its ties to the black Popular Front
and increasingly weakening the link between race and class. 45
The presidential campaign of 1948 marked both the high point and the
demise of the postwar black-Iabor-Ieft coalition. The coalition found a
national voice in Henry Wallace, a New Dealer who broke with the
Democratic Party and ran for president on a third-party ticket. Courting the
black vote with a progressive civil rights platform, Democratic Party
candidate Harry S. Truman trounced Wallace but alienated the Dixiecrats,
248 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

conservative southern congressmen who bolted the Democratic convention

and formed their own party-a way station, as it turned out, on a road that
would lead many conservative white southerners to support George C.
Wallace briefly and then, with the election of Richard M. Nixon in 1972,
move in large numbers to the Republican Party.46
The Dixiecrats also left another legacy. They perfected a combination of
race- and red-baiting that defeated the South's leading New Deal politicians
in the critical election of 1950 and, ten years later, allowed segregationists to
claim that the civil rights movement was "communist inspired." Red-baiting
thus got a second lease on life, spawning a dense network of "little HUACs"
and "little FBIs," local imitations of the House Committee on Un-American
Activities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, throughout the South.
Led by some of the region's most powerful politicians, notably Mississippi's
James Eastland, those agencies hounded "subversives" of every sort, from
veterans of the black-labor-left alliance, to local NAACP officials, to gay
teachers, to national civil rights leaders, thus extending McCarthyism well
into the 1960s, long after it had fallen into disrepute at the nationalleve1. 47

The Classical Phase of the Movement

In the South, perhaps more than anywhere else in the country, the cold war
destroyed Popular Front institutions and diverted the civil rights movement
into new channels. When the so-called classical phase of the movement
erupted in the late 1950s and 1960s, it involved blacks and whites, south-
erners and northerners, local people and federal officials, secularists and
men and women of faith. It also extended far beyond the South, and
throughout the country it drew on multiple, competing ideological strands.
But on the ground, in the South, the movement's ability to rally participants,
stymie its enemies, and break through the fog of the cold war came largely
from the prophetic tradition within the black church. Cold war liberals
counseled patience while countering international criticism by suggesting
that racism was not woven into American institutions; it was limited to the
South, a retrograde region that economic development would eventually
bring into line with an otherwise democratic nation. By contrast, southern
civil rights activists, mobilizing the latent themes of justice and deliverance
in an otherworldly religion, demanded "freedom now," not gradual, top-
down amelioration. That prophetic vision gave believers the courage to
engage history as an ongoing process of reconstruction to risk everything for
ideals they might never see fulfilled. 48
Those ideals have often been misconstrued, not only by those on the right
who reduce them to color blindness but also by those on the left who stress
the southern movement's limitations. In their zeal to make up for inatten-
tion to the freedom struggle in the North and West, for instance, urban
historians sometimes draw a misleading contrast between a northern
embrace of economics and black power and a southern commitment to a
minimalist program of interracial ism and integration. That dichotomy
 Political Uses of the Past 249

ignores both the long history of nonviolent struggles against segregation in

the North and the fact that black southerners were schooled in a quest both
for access and for self-determination that dated back to emancipation, a
quest that called forth strategies ranging from tactical alliances across the
color line, to the building of separate institutions, to migration, to economic
boycotts and direct action. 49 In both regions, the success of the movement
depended not just on idealism and courage, but on a keen understanding
and ready use of the fulcrums of power.
There was, moreover, nothing minimalist about dismantling Jim Crow, a
system built as much on economic exploitation as on de jure and de facto
spatial separation. In the minds of movement activists, integration was
never about "racial mingling" or "merely sitting next to whites in school,"
as it is sometimes caricatured now. 50 Nor did it imply assimilation into static
white-defined institutions, however much whites assumed that it did. True
integration was and is an expansive and radical goal, not an ending or
abolition of something that once was-the legal separation of bodies by
race-but a process of transforming institutions and building an equitable,
democratic, multiracial, and multiethnic society.51
The 1963 March on Washington which came at the height of what figures
in the dominant narrative as the good, color-blind movement, is a case in
point. Today's conservatives make much of Martin Luther King's dream that
"children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the
color of their skin but by the content of their character." But virtually noth-
ing in the dominant narrative would lead us to expect an image of the march
that showed women carrying signs demanding jobs for all, decent housing,
fair pay, and equal rights "NOW," thus asserting both their racial solidarity
and their identities as activists and workers and thereby the equals of men. 52
Nothing in the dominant story reminds us that this demonstration which
mobilized people from all walks of life and from every part of the country
was a "march for jobs and freedom" -and that from early on women were
in the front ranks, helping to link race, class, and gender and thus foreshad-
owing both black feminism and the expansive movement of movements the
civil rights struggle set in motion (figures 10.1 and 10.2). 53
In recent years we have learned more and more about the continuities
between the 1940s and the 1960s, especially about the civil rights activists
who came to political consciousness in the earlier period and then groomed
and guided the young men and women who stepped forward in later years.
E. D. Nixon, the stalwart NAACP leader who recruited King for the
Montgomery bus boycott, was a veteran of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
Porters, the black-led union that was central to the movement in the 1940s.
Ella Baker passed on to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) the radical pedagogy and organizing style she had learned both
from her upbringing in the rural South and from the left-wing politics of
Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. Bayard Rustin, one of the movement's most
brilliant strategists, had been "an eager young explorer of the American left,
broadly defined." Anne Braden, a white southerner who became, as Angela
250

Figure 10.1 Protesters at the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, DC, carry signs for
equal rights, integrated schools, decent housing, and an end to bias.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Figure 10.2 Photographers, riding on the back of a truck, photograph civil rights leaders,
including Martin Luther King, Jr., and the crowd carrying signs, as they take part in the 1963
Civil Rights March on Washington, DC.
Source: Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.
 Political Uses of the Past 25 I

Y. Davis put it, a "legend" to young radicals, worked for Left-led unions in
the late 1940s and continues to carry the banner of antiracism to this day.
Frances Pauley got her start working for the New Deal in Georgia, helped
mobilize white women on behalf of desegregation, and spent the rest of her
life in the fight for civil rights and against poverty. 54
The differences and discontinuities, however, were critical as well. The
activists of the 1960s relied on independent protest organizations; they
could not ground their battle in growing, vibrant, social democratic unions.
They also suffered from a rupture in the narrative, a void at the center of the
story of the modern civil rights struggle that is only now beginning to be
filled. Many young activists of the 1960s saw their efforts as a new depar-
ture and themselves as a unique generation, not as actors with much to learn
from an earlier, labor-infused civil rights tradition. Persecution, censorship,
and self-censorship reinforced that generational divide by sidelining inde-
pendent black radicals, thus whitening the memory and historiography of
the Left and leaving later generations with an understanding of black poli-
tics that dichotomizes nationalism and integrationism. The civil rights
unionism of the 1940s-which combined a principled and tactical belief in
interracial organizing with a strong emphasis on black culture and institu-
tions-was lost to memory. As the movement waned and contrary political
forces resumed power, that loss left a vacuum for the current dominant
narrative to fill.55

Beyond Declension
In the dominant narrative, the decline of the movement follows hard on the
heels of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, and the popular struggles of
the 1970s become nothing more than identity politics, divisive squabbles
that promoted tribalism, alienated white workers, and swelled the ranks
of the New Right. 56 The view of the 1970s as a tragic denouement belittles
second-wave feminism and other movements that emerged from the black
freedom struggle and institutionalized themselves even as they served as the
New Right's antagonists and foils. It also erases from popular memory
the way the victories of the early 1960s coalesced into a lasting social revo-
lution, as thousands of ordinary people pushed through the doors the move-
ment had opened and worked to create new, integrated institutions where
none had existed before. 57
The literature on the post-sixties is still in its infancy, and except in
accounts of the women's and gay rights movements, scholars left, right, and
center have told stories of declension. A burst of new work on the black
power movement, however, has departed from that model, documenting "an
African American ... political renaissance" in the 1970s, in which advocates
of black political power put forth a program of urban reform that echoed the
demands raised thirty years before. 58 Studies of other aspects of the black
freedom movement in the North also offer powerful evidence that the civil
rights movement did not die when it "went north" in the late 1960s, in part
252 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

because it had been north all along. Still needed is more research on all
aspects of the movement of movements in the post-sixties that rivals in
nuance and complexity what we know about the classical phase. 59
The studies that we do have reveal overlapping grassroots struggles. One
struggle involved the move from token to comprehensive school desegregation
in the South, which took place not during the turbulent short civil rights
movement, but in the 1970s, after the media spotlight had swung away from
the region. Another involved the desegregation of the workplace and the wide-
spread acceptance of fair employment practices as a worthy goal. Like civil
rights unionism, both of those advances have been forgotten or distorted. Both
deserve to move from the margins to the center of the civil rights saga. Both,
moreover, belong not to the past, but to the present, not to a story of right-
wing triumph and over-and-done-with declension, but to an ongoing project
whose key crises may still lie ahead.
The Brown decision and the rock-throwing mobs of Little Rock occupy
pride of place in the popular narrative of school desegregation in the South.
Barely noted is another critical turning point, a case in which black and
white southerners grappled directly with the spatialization of race in the
region. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), a
case originating in North Carolina, civil rights lawyers exposed the artificial
distinction between de jure and de facto segregation by demonstrating
beyond a doubt that governmental policies, not benign-sounding customs,
had created an almost totally segregated school system. " 'I lived here for
twenty-four years without knowing what was going on,''' commented
Judge James McMillan, who handed down a historic decision ordering two-
way busing of black children to wealthy white suburbs and suburban chil-
dren to city schools. A vigorous white homeowners' movement fought the
decision tooth and nail, couching its opposition, not in the discredited rhet-
oric of massive resistance that surrounded the Little Rock debacle, but in a
language of color blindness that resonated nationwide. 60
More surprising, given how busing has come to symbolize all that went
wrong with the dream of integration, a coalition of blue-collar activists,
women's groups, white liberals, and black parents arose to defeat the home-
owners' movement. Moreover, Charlotte took the unusual step of maintain-
ing one of its historically black high schools rather than tearing it down and
putting the burden on black students to sink or swim in hostile, white-
dominated institutions. That school-West Charlotte High School-launched
an experiment in true integration that reverberates to this day. Although
many of the city's white students decamped to private schools, as they did
throughout the South, Charlotte's success became such a point of civic pride
that when the presidential candidate Ronald Reagan announced, during a
campaign stop in 1984, that court-ordered busing "takes innocent children
out of the neighborhood schools and makes them pawns in a social
experiment that nobody wants," his largely Republican audience responded
with an "awkward silence" that spoke louder than words. 61 Twenty years
later, interviews conducted separately by the Southern Oral History
 Political Uses ofthe Past 253

Program and by researchers at Columbia University's Teachers College sug-

gested that, especially for students at West Charlotte High during the peak
years of integration, confronting racial differences and crossing racial
boundaries was life changing in ways that test scores and statistics cannot
capture. They treasured the experience, felt that it had dissipated "the
hostility and the hate" of early years, and struggled to maintain a degree of
diversity in their later lives. 62
By the 1980s aggressive court supervision plus ongoing pressure from
black parents and students and their white allies had done what no one could
have predicted: they had endowed the South with the most integrated school
systems in the country, an achievement that has virtually disappeared from
the master narrative and barely registers even in scholarly accounts of the
movement. The era of desegregation was marked by other forms of political
and economic progress as well, most notably the surge in black voter regis-
tration and the election of black officials after the Voting Rights Act of 1965
and the desegregation of the workforce, as grassroots activists took advantage
of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which barred employment discrimination
by race and sex. Each of those advances reinforced the other. Black voters
acquired a leverage with school boards and access to public employment they
had never enjoyed before. As black students escaped from schools of concen-
trated poverty and took advantage of preschool and after-school programs,
smaller classes, superior facilities, and other benefits long monopolized by
suburban schools, a growing percentage attended college and entered mana-
gerial and professional positions. In a society in which economic status was
increasingly determined by education, the black middle class expanded. 63
Nothing, perhaps, reflects the success of this push for political representation,
jobs, and education more vividly than the phenomenon of return migration to
the South. In the 1970s Mrican Americans, who for more than half a century
had fled or been pushed from the region, began answering a "call to home."
Drawn by new opportunities, they returned in droves, not just to the cities,
but to the small towns and rural areas of the region. 64
As blacks sought to reclaim the South and the South rejoined the coun-
try, however, the country was moving, seemingly inexorably, toward reseg-
regation. In 1973 and 1974 the Supreme Court made two fateful decisions,
each of which "insulated predominately white suburban school districts
from the constitutional imperatives of Brown . .. and offered white parents
in urban districts fearful of school desegregation havens of predominately
white public schools to which they could flee." Ignoring the public policies
that had created the white enclaves in the first place, the Supreme Court in
Milliken v. Bradley (1974) exempted the suburbs around Detroit from
desegregation plans on the grounds that they had not engaged in recent,
intentional acts of discrimination. In San Antonio Independent School
District v. Rodriguez (1973), the Court ruled that the states faced no
obligation under the federal Constitution to equalize funding among
school districts. By the early 1990s, the Reagan-Bush courts were lifting the
court-ordered desegregation plans of the 1970s, even in states where dual
254 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

school systems had been required by law. After only two decades, the courts
effectively abandoned the effort to enforce desegregation. By the late 1990s,
judges had gone so far as to prohibit school boards from voluntarily using
considerations of race (and thus of history and social reality) to maintain
their hard-won progress toward integration. 65
Throughout the South and the country, except in the Northeast, which
never experienced significant desegregation, resegregation is now proceeding
apace. Often blamed on the reflexive racism connoted by the all-purpose
term "white flight" or, more recently, on black disillusionment with integra-
tion, that reversal can be better understood as the outcome, in an atmosphere
of judicial hostility, of long-term failures to limit residential segregation, halt
the decay of inner cities, prevent urban sprawl, address growing class divi-
sions, and alter school-funding arrangements that favor suburban schools.
Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that middle-class parents of both
races feel acute pressure to buy homes in neighborhoods with reputable,
well-financed schools and that parents in now hypersegregated inner cities
sometimes demand the resources they hope will provide their children with a
separate but equal education. Those pressures, moreover, have intensified as
the No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2002, has shifted the focus of edu-
cational policy away from funding and onto accountability and assessment
in ways that often punish resource-poor schools, drive away the best teach-
ers and better-off students, and deepen poverty and segregation. And yet, in
spite of everything, large majorities of both whites and blacks maintain a
commitment to integration-a commitment that public policy makers and
pundits have done nothing to promote and are doing their best to squander. 66
If the continuing story of school desegregation has been obscured by a
narrative of post-1965 declension, the struggle for economic justice has
been erased altogether. That struggle took many forms. In Seattle,
Washington, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched its first
direct-action campaign against employment discrimination in 1961 and fol-
lowed up in 1964 with one of the most ambitious campaigns in the nation.
In Memphis, Tennessee, black workers persisted in seeing civil rights and
workers' rights as two aspects of the same struggle; the 1968 sanitation
strike-best known as the context of King's assassination-was part of a
decades-long push by black workers to attain better workplace conditions
and fair wages. In Oakland, California, and other places, the Black Panthers
called for a redistribution of economic and political power in cities
devastated by four decades of failed metropolitan policies. 67
More likely to be included in the prevailing narrative is President Lyndon B.
johnson's War on Poverty, an ambitious effort not only to join the issues of
economics and civil rights, but also to expand the New Deal in order to
address the economic inequalities embedded in American institutions.
Launched in 1965, the program fell far short of its goals, not, as conservatives
would have it, because it "threw money" at problems that only private
enterprise and individual effort could solve, but because it did not go nearly
 Political Uses of the Past 255

far enough and because the minimally funded initiatives it did launch
focused so heavily on "supply side" solutions such as job training, rather
than on full employment, unionization, and the redistribution of economic
resources. Nevertheless, the Great Society yielded lasting and important
results (Medicaid and Head Start come immediately to mind), and it turned
many activists in the direction of structural economic solutions. 68
By contrast, the grassroots movement set in motion by Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been among the least noted of the movement's
economic dimensions. Thousands of men and women, including a persistent
and evolving network of labor feminists, pursued their rights under that
historic law by signing petitions, filing class-action lawsuits, seeking affir-
mative action policies that specified hiring goals and timetables, and step-
ping forward to become courageous pioneers, the first of their race or sex to
brave the minefields of long-segregated occupations. Once on the job, black
workers became the most avid of new union members, and the understand-
ing of workplace rights they brought with them inspired a surge of organiz-
ing in the public sector, which became one of the brightest spots in an
otherwise-bleak landscape for organized labor. In combination, government
intervention and grassroots action made 1965-1975 the breakthrough
period for black economic progress, especially in the South. That victory
inspired Latinos and others to make similar demands and adopt similar
strategies. As a result, legal protection of individuals from workplace dis-
crimination was extended to a large majority of Americans, including not
only people of color and all women, but also the elderly and the disabled. 69
In the early 1970s, moreover, a remarkable union democracy movement
sought to revitalize the labor movement, and a wave of strikes swept the
country, suggesting that the white workers now seen as preordained
"Reagan Democrats" were by no means united, and that their allegiance
was "up for grabs."70 At the same time, a little-noticed cohort of civil rights
veterans threw in their lot with the labor movement and launched labor sup-
port campaigns. As rank-and-file workers, rising labor leaders, labor
lawyers, and the like, they joined other civil rights activists in an effort to
"raise issues of economic equality ... to the moral high ground earlier
occupied by the assault against de jure segregation. "71
Like the battle to desegregate the public schools, the struggle for eco-
nomic justice met formidable barriers. Some were deep-seated, such as
American individualism, the intensification of capital flight, and the legacy
of anticommunism, which, in combination with the New Right's "war of
ideas," tainted all attempts at redistribution. Others were produced by the
unique economic crisis of the 1970s. Brought on by the simultaneous rise of
unemployment and inflation known as "stagflation," the crisis galvanized a
corporate offensive against unions and accelerated an ongoing process of
economic restructuring that forwarded the emergence of a service economy
and destroyed not only the strongholds of organized labor in the rust belt,
but the South's traditional industries as well. At the same time, economic
256 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

change in Latin America and the alteration of immigration restrictions in

the 1960s sent millions of Latinos searching for work in northern cities.
This wave of Third World immigration created new hybrid identities and
spawned new liberation movements. But as the labor supply swelled and the
blue-collar jobs opened up by Title VII evaporated, communities of color
suffered from shocking rates of unemployment, and inner cities turned into
burnt-out wastelands from which few could hope to escape.72
As layoffs skyrocketed, moreover, increasing numbers of white male work-
ers, influenced by conservatives' pseudopopulist claims, blamed affirmative
action, despite conclusive evidence that employers' efforts to hire and pro-
mote blacks and women did not lead to significant "reverse discrimination."
As Thomas Sugrue has noted, "Long-term economic restructuring was
inscrutable to most white workers. But affirmative action was an easy
target"-in part because powerful stories and storytellers made it SO.?3 The
struggle for the equal rights amendment and abortion rights had a similar
impact on some working-class wives. Dependent on men in an atmosphere of
deepening economic insecurity and inundated with New Right attacks on the
women's movement as an antifamily, elitist plot, they opposed reform in part
out of fear that feminism would "free men first," leaving women with no
claim to male protection and support. 74
These developments helped to propel the New Right to power and
encouraged the Reagan administration's efforts to gut antidiscrimination
enforcement mechanisms. This deregulation of the labor market forwarded a
resurgence of antiblack discrimination based on "hidden preferences and
stereotypes" that are well documented but almost impossible to prove and
thus helped reverse almost two decades of black economic gains.?5 Still, as
Nancy MacLean argues, the right wing's triumph was by no means
complete, in part because Reagan's efforts aroused a storm of opposition
from advocacy groups, and in part because many large corporations, after
years of resistance, embraced affirmative action, albeit in the new, watered-
down form of "diversity"-a move designed, not to forward redistributive
justice, but to help businesses reach new consumers and operate in global
markets. The result is a stalemate that underscores both the ground won by
advocates of economic access and the need for broader federal action to
promote full employment, tame corporate power, and protect unions. On
the one hand, government policy, driven by grassroots pressure, succeeded
in cracking the edifice of racial discrimination erected over time by both
employers and white-dominated unions. On the other, economic restruc-
turing drove home how far beyond the reach of governmental protections
against discrimination workers' dilemmas often lay. Without a strong
collective voice, workers had no means of defending themselves against
unfair labor practices (as opposed to willful bias against individuals) or of
countering corporate control of the state. Nor could they build on and
expand the legacy of civil rights unionism by transforming the fight for fair
employment into an antiracist, antisexist, social democratic project for the
twenty-first century.?6
 Political Uses of the Past 257

Conclusion
The challenges faced by the civil rights movement stemmed from what Martin
Luther King Jr. called "evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of
our society," evils that reflected not just the legacy of slavery but also the per-
petuation of that legacy during subsequent generations by racialized state
policies that wove white privilege into the fabric of American culture and
institutions.?7 Despite the movement's undeniable triumphs, those evils persist
and in some ways have been compounded. The resegregation of the public
schools; the hypersegregation of inner cities; the soaring unemployment rates
among black and Latino youths; the erosion of minority voting rights; the
weakening of the labor movement; the wealth and income gap that is return-
ing the United States to pre-New Deal conditions; the unraveling of the social
safety net; the ever-increasing ability of placeless capital to move at will; the
malignant growth of the "prison-industrial complex,"which far outstrips
apartheid-era South Africa in incarcerating black men-those historicallega-
cies cannot be waved away by declaring victory, mandating formal, race-
neutral public policies, and allowing market forces to rule. 78
Nor, of course, will understanding how the past weighs on the present in
itself resolve current dilemmas. But it can help cut through the miasma of
evasion and confusion that cripples our creativity from the start. For many
white Americans have moved through what the critical theorist Walter
Benjamin termed "this storm ... we call progress" without coming to terms
with the past?9 That lack of accounting opens the way to a color-blind con-
servatism that is breathtakingly ahistorical and blind to social facts. It
impoverishes public discourse, discourages investment in public institutions,
and undermines our will to address the inequalities and injustices that sur-
round us now.
The narratives spun by the new conservatives maintain a strong hold on
the public imagination, in part because they have been repeated so often and
broadcast so widely, and in part because they avoid uncomfortable ques-
tions about the relationship between cumulative white advantage and pres-
ent social ills. Yet there is reason to hope that countervailing stories could
make themselves heard and could even, under the right circumstances, pre-
vail. Opinion poll after poll indicates that white racial attitudes have
changed dramatically since World War II, that support for the principles of
integration and equal treatment remains high (even as approval of govern-
mental intervention to accomplish those goals has declined), and that most
white as well as black Americans continue to favor the keystones of the New
Deal order.80 Those attitudes should not be underestimated. They do not
mean that hidden or even overt biases have disappeared or that sedimented,
institutional inequalities have been eliminated. But they are the ground in
which new understandings of today's problems can take root. Those
understandings must grapple both with history, which explodes the notion
that racial disparities are caused by black failings, and with the abundant evi-
dence that the distress of people of color today is indeed "the first sign of a
258 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

danger that threatens us all." That danger-whose signs range from the
every-family-for-itself scramble for "good schools" to the high cost of "prisons,
police, mopping-up health care services, and other reactive measures"-if
amplified by public storytellers, could combine with antiracist principles to
create a climate in which fresh solutions to social problems can emerge. 81
Historians can and must playa central role in a struggle that turns so cen-
trally on understanding the legacy of the past. But how can we make ourselves
heard without reducing history to the formulaic mantras on which political
narratives usually rely? To tell our stories both truly and effectively, we need
modes of writing and speaking that emphasize individual agency, the sine qua
non of narrative, while also dramatizing the hidden history of policies and
institutions-the publicly sanctioned choices that continually shape and
reshape the social landscape and yet are often invisible to citizens trained in not
seeing and in thinking exclusively in ahistorical, personal terms. We cannot set-
tle for simple dichotomies (especially those that pit race against class, race-tar-
geted against universalistic remedies, and so-called identity politics against
economic policy and unionization), no matter how seductive they might be.
Finally, we must forego easy closure and satisfying upward or downward arcs.
Only such novel forms of storytelling can convey what it means to have
lived through an undefeated but unfinished revolution, a world-defining
social movement that has experienced both reversals and victories and
whose victories are now, once again, being partially reversed. 82 Both the vic-
tories and the reversals call us to action, as citizens and as historians with
powerful stories to tell. Both are part of a long and ongoing civil rights
movement. Both can help us imagine-for our own times-a new way of
life, a continuing revolution.

Notes
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History at the University of
North Carolina and director of the Southern Oral History Program. This article is a
revised version of the presidential address delivered to the convention of the Organization
of American Historians in Boston on March 27,2004.
Writing this essay led me to conversation with a far-flung network of friends and col-
leagues, and I thank them for their encouragement and generous sharing of ideas. Among
them were Jefferson Cowie, Jane Dailey, Matthew Lassiter, Nelson Lichtenstein, Eric
Lott, Nancy MacLean, Bryant Simon, and Karen Kruse Thomas. Laura Edwards, Drew
Faust, Glenda Gilmore, Jeanne Grimm, Pamela Grundy, Bethany Johnson, Robert
Korstad, Joanne Meyerowitz, Timothy McCarthy, Joe Mosnier, Kathryn N asstrom, Della
Pollock, Jennifer Ritterhouse, and Sarah Thuesen also offered astute comments on the
manuscript in its various iterations. I benefited especially from Bethany Johnson's
research and editorial skills, and Elizabeth More provided additional research assistance.
A fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study provided an ideal community
in which to think and write.
1. On civil rights autobiographies and histories, see Kathryn L. Nasstrom, "Between
Memory and History: Autobiographies of the Civil Rights Movement and the Writing
of a New Civil Rights History," National Endowment for the Humanities Lecture,
University of San Francisco, April 29, 2002 (in Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's possession);
Steven F. Lawson, "Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil
 Political Uses of the Past 259

Rights Movement," American Historical Review 96 (April 1991): 456-71; Adam

Fairclough, "Historians and the Civil Rights Movement,"Journal of American Studies
24 (December 1990): 387-98; Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The
Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA, 1995),
413-41; Charles W. Eagles, "Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era," Journal
of Southern History 66 (November 2000): 815-48; and Kevin Gaines, "The
Historiography of the Struggle for Black Equality since 1945," in A Companion to
Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, MA,
2002), 211-34. In contrast to the vast literature on what the movement was and what
it did, the scholarship on how it is remembered is scattered and thin. For examples, see
David A. Zonderman, review of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site,
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and National Civil Rights Museum, Journal of
American History 91 (June 2004): 174-83; Kathryn L. Nasstrom, "Down to Now:
Memory, Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta,
Georgia," Gender and History 11 (April 1999): 113-44; Terrie L. Epstein, "Tales from
Two Textbooks: A Comparison of the Civil Rights Movement in Two Secondary
History Textbooks," Social Studies 85 (May-June 1994): 121-26; William A. Link,
review of the film The Road to Brown, by William A. Ellwood, Mykola Kulish, and
Gary Weimberg, History of Education Quarterly 31 (Winter 1991-1992): 523-26; and
an anthology in progress: Leigh Raiford and Renee Romano, eds., " 'Freedom Is a
Constant Struggle': The Civil Rights Movement in United States Memory" (in Leigh
Raiford and Renee Romano's possession).
2. Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (Chicago,
1971),111-22, esp. 111.
3. Martin Luther King Jr., "The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness (1960)," in I Have
a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, ed. James Melvin
Washington (San Francisco, CA, 1992), 67. For early protests against the tendency to
idolize King and to ignore his radicalism and that of the grassroots, see "A Round
Table: Martin Luther King Jr.," Journal of American History 74 (September 1987):
436-81. For a call for attention to the later King years, see Michael Honey, "Labor
and Civil Rights Movements at the Cross-Roads: Martin Luther King, Black Workers,
and the Memphis Sanitation Strike," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the
Organization of American Historians, Memphis, TN, April 2003 (in Hall's posses-
sion).
4. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order,
1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ, 1989); Van Gosse, "A Movement of Movements: The
Definition and Periodization of the New Left," in Companion to Post-1945 America,
ed. Agnew and Rosenzweig, 277-302, esp. 282.
5. The meaning of race and racism in America has always been inflected by ethnic exclu-
sions and identities, and it has been complicated by the demographic changes in the
late twentieth century. In this essay, however, I limit my focus to the black-white
divide. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting
Power, Transforming Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2002),11.
6. Kevin Mattson, "Civil Rights Made Harder," Reviews in American History 30
(December 2002): 663-70.
7. Julian Bond, "The Media and the Movement: Looking Back from the Southern
Front," in Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, ed.
Brian Ward (Gainesville, FL, 2001), 16-40, esp. 32. See also Robert J. Norrell, "One
Thing We Did Right: Reflections on the Movement," in New Directions in Civil
Rights Studies, ed. Armstead L. Robinson and Patricia Sullivan (Charlottesville, VA,
1991),72-73,77; and Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 391-405.
8. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 391. For works that stress the events of the clas-
sical phase but also highlight the long trajectory of the movement, see ibid.; Manning
260 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America,
1945-1990 (Jackson, MS, 1991); Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights
and Black Politics in America since 1941 (New York, 1997); Adam Fairclough, Race
and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, GA,
1995); and Greta De Jong, A Different Day: African American Struggles for Justice in
Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill, 2002). Community studies tend to blur the
boundaries of the dominant narrative, and biographies often illuminate North/South
linkages and the fluidity and diversity of the movement. See, for example, George
Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia,
PA, 1995). For a growing chorus of calls for a broader scholarly focus, see Robert
Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals,
and the Early Civil Rights Movement," Journal of American History 75 (December
1988): 786-811; Timothy B. Tyson, "Robert F. Williams, 'Black Power,' and the Roots
of the African American Freedom Struggle," ibid., 85 (September 1998), 540-70;
Julian Bond, "The Politics of Civil Rights History," in New Directions in Civil Rights
Studies, ed. Robinson and Sullivan, 8-16; Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 3,
391-405,413-41; Charles Payne, "Debating the Civil Rights Movement: The View
from the Trenches," in Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968, by Steven F.
Lawson and Charles Payne (Lanham, MD, 1998), 108-11; Peniel E. Joseph, "Waiting
till the Midnight Hour: Reconceptualizing the Heroic Period of the Civil Rights
Movement, 1954-1965," Souls, 2 (Spring 2000): 6-17; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,
"Mobilizing Memory: Broadening Our View of the Civil Rights Movement,"
Chronicle of Higher Education (July 27, 2001): B7-Bll; Nell Irvin Painter, "America
Needs to Reexamine Its Civil Rights History," Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
(August 31, 2001): 132-34; Brian Ward, "Introduction: Forgotten Wails and Master
Narratives: Media, Culture, and Memories of the Modern African American Freedom
Struggle," in Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, ed.
Ward, 1-15; Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar
Oakland (Princeton, 2003), 10-11, 330-31; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham,
"Foreword," in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South,
1940-1980, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York, 2003), viii-xvi;
Jeanne Theoharis, "Introduction," ibid., 1-15; Van Gosse, "Postmodern America: A
New Democratic Order in the Second Gilded Age," in The World the Sixties Made:
Politics and Culture in Recent America, ed. Van Gosse and Richard Moser
(Philadelphia, PA, 2003), 1-36; Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The
Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 1-4; and
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
(Cambridge, MA, 2004), 4-14.
9. For a bracing look at the reinvention of the Right in the 1970s, see Nancy MacLean,
"Freedom Is Not Enough": How the Fight over Jobs and Justice Changed America
(Cambridge, MA, forthcoming), chap. 7. I am indebted to MacLean for sharing her
work with me. For the metamorphosis of conservatism in the West and South, see Lisa
McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ,
2001); Anders Walker, "The Ghost of Jim Crow: Law, Culture, and the Subversion of
Civil Rights, 1954-1965" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2003); Anders Walker,
"Legislating Virtue: How Segregationists Disguised Racial Discrimination as Moral
Reform Following Brown v. Board of Education," Duke Law Journal 47 (November
1997): 399-424; Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis, eds., The Moderates'
Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville,
1998); Matthew D. Lassiter, "The Suburban Origins of 'Color-Blind' Conservatism:
Middle-Class Consciousness in the Charlotte Busing Crisis," Journal of Urban
History (May 30, 2004): 549-82; and Richard A. Pride, The Political Use of Racial
Narratives: School Desegregation in Mobile, Alabama, 1954-97 (Urbana, IL, 2002).
 Political Uses of the Past 261

10. The quotation is from Ernest Van den Haag, "Reverse Discrimination: A Brief
against It," National Review (April 29, 1977): 493, cited in MacLean," Freedom Is
Not Enough," chap. 7.
11. Proponents of this new racial orthodoxy differ in tone and, to a lesser extent, in
ideas. I am stressing the interventions of those who present themselves as the voice of
the reasoned, informed center or as "racial realists," in Alan Wolfe's phrase. I refer
to them as "new conservatives" or "color-blind conservatives." For racial realism,
see Alan Wolfe, "Enough Blame to Go Around," New York Times Book Review,
June 12, 1998, p. 12; Philip Klinkner, "The 'Racial Realism' Hoax," Nation,
December 14, 1998, pp. 33-38; "Letters," ibid., January, 25, 1999, p. 24; and
Michael K. Brown et aI., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society
(Berkeley, CA, 2003), 5-12, 224. For the spectrum and evolution of new conserva-
tive writing on race, see Charles A. Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy,
1950-1980 (New York, 1984); Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
(New York, 1984); Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial
Society (New York, 1995); Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in
Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York, 1997); Jim Sleeper, Liberal
Racism (New York, 1997); Tamar Jacoby, Someone Else's House: America's
Unfinished Struggle for Integration (New York, 1998); Shelby Steele, A Dream
Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America (New York, 1998); and
Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap
in Learning (New York, 2003). Critiques of color-blind conservatives, which dispute
the conservatives's understanding of history, interpretation of civil rights law, and
research, include Brown et aI., Whitewashing Race; J. Morgan Kousser, Colorblind
Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious:
The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ, 1996); Stephen Steinberg, Turning
Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston,
MA, 2001); MacLean, "Freedom Is Not Enough"; and Alice O'Connor, "Malign
Neglect," Du Bois Review 1 (November 2004), forthcoming.
12. This formulation is drawn from Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, "Race, Reform, and
Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law," in
Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberle
Crenshaw et ai. (New York, 1995), 105.
13. Gosse, "Postmodern America," 5; Brown et aI., Whitewashing Race, 224. We have
little scholarship on the mushrooming of conservative think tanks and foundations
and their role in training and supporting policy intellectuals and marketers and thus
in shaping the terms of American political debate. This lack of attention leaves intact
the assumption that the current assault on the gains of the civil rights movement
results from a more or less spontaneous shift in public opinion that proponents of
racial and gender justice often feel helpless to combat. For a start, see Leon Howell,
Funding the War of Ideas: A Report to the United Church Board for Homeland
Ministries (Cleveland, 1995); Jean Stefancic and Richard Delgado, No Mercy: How
Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America's Social Agenda
(Philadelphia, 1996); David Callahan, $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think
Tanks in the 1990s (Washington, DC, 1999); Lee Cokorinos, The Assault on
Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Lanham, MD,
2003); and Andrew Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise
(New York, 2004).
14. Pride, Political Use of Racial Narratives, 4-20, 244-72, esp. 9 and 272.
15. Nancy MacLean, "Redesigning Dixie with Affirmative Action: Race, Gender, and
the Desegregation of the Southern Textile Mill World," in Gender and the Southern
Body Politic: Essays and Comments, ed. Nancy Bercaw (jackson, MS, 2000), 163.
262 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

16. On the reshaping of cities by the two internal migrations, see Robert o. Self and
Thomas J. Sugrue, "The Power of Place: Race, Political Economy, and Identity in the
Postwar Metropolis," in Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Agnew and
Rosenzweig, 20-43.
17. Robert o. Self, " 'Negro Leadership and Negro Money': African American Political
Organizing in Oakland before the Panthers," in Freedom North, ed. Theoharis and
Woodard, 99-100. For the long-neglected topic of women and migration, see
Darlene Clark Hine, "Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender
Dimension, 1915-1945," in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New
Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. (Bloomington,
IN, 1991), 127-46; Kimberley L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American
Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945
(Urbana, IL, 1999); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African
American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill, 1996);
Megan Taylor Shockley, "We, Too, Are Americans": African American Women in
Detroit and Richmond, 1940-54 (Urbana, 2004); and Laurie Beth Green, "Battling
the Plantation Mentality: Consciousness, Culture, and the Politics of Race, Class,
and Gender in Memphis, 1940-1968" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1999).
18. Self, American Babylon, 88; Laurie B. Green, "Race, Gender, and Labor in 1960s
Memphis: 'I AM A MAN' and the Meaning of Freedom," Journal of Urban History
30 (March 2004): 467.
19. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for
Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 2001).
20. Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton,
NJ, 2002), 96. On gender, race, and welfare, see Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity;
Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison, WI, 1990); Linda
Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare,
1890-1935 (New York, 1994); and Michael K. Brown, Race, Money, and the
American Welfare State (Ithaca, 1999). For changes in the family-wage system as the
key theme of post-World War II women's history, see Nancy MacLean, "Postwar
Women's History: The 'Second Wave' or the End of the Family Wage?" in
Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Agnew and Rosenzweig, 235-59.
21. My discussion of white ethnic workers, the middle class, and the spatialization of
race draws on the work of brilliant urban historians, especially Kenneth T. Jackson,
"Race, Ethnicity, and Real Estate Appraisal: The Home Owners Loan Corporation
and the Federal Housing Administration," Journal of Urban History 6 (August
1980): 419-52; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the
United States (New York, 1985); Thomas W. Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South
City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975 (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1998); Thomas J. Sugrue, "Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the
Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940-1964," Journal of American
History 82 (September 1995): 551-78; Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second
Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York, 1983); Thomas J.
Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(Princeton, 1996); Kevin Fox Gotham, "Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants, and the
Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a U.S. City, 1900-50," International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (September 2000): 616-33; Self,
American Babylon; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights
in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 112-36, 223-49; Lizabeth
Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (New York, 2003); Kenneth D. DUff, Behind the Backlash: White Working-
Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (Chapel Hill, 2003); and Bryant Simon,
 Political Uses of the Past 263

Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (New York,
2004). I am also indebted to Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American
Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA, 1993);
and Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State. On how veterans'
benefits disadvantaged blacks, see Brown et aI., Whitewashing Race, 75-77.
22. Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 241-49.
23. Self, American Babylon, 333-34.
24. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New
Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York, 1995).
25. For the argument that the South "traveled almost directly from the countryside to
suburbia" and that "the southern city became the quintessential suburban city," see
David R. Goldfield, Promised Land: The South since 1945 (Arlington Heights, IL,
1987), 153, 34.
26. On such black-white interactions, see Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in
the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2004); and Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse,
"Learning Race: Racial Etiquette and the Socialization of Children in the Jim Crow
South" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1999).
27. For the argument that racialism arose in feudal Europe before Europe's encounter
with Africa and that capitalism and racialism evolved together to produce "a mod-
ern world system of 'racial capitalism' dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism,
and genocide," see Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black
Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 2-3; and Robin D. G. Kelley,
"Foreword," ibid., esp. xiii. I use "racial capitalism" to emphasize that unfettered
capitalism as well as racialism produced the Jim Crow system and to suggest
similarities between the North and the South. For such uses of the term by southern
historians, see Hall, "Mobilizing Memory," B8; Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil
Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-
Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), 55; and Brian Kelly, "Sentinels
for New South Industry: Booker T. Washington, Industrial Accommodation,
and Black Workers in the Jim Crow South," Labor History 44 (August 2003): 339.
On the patriarchal political culture of the black belt elite, see Kari A. Frederickson,
The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 (Chapel Hill,
NC,2001).
28. Robert Korstad, "Class and Caste: Unraveling the Mysteries of the New South
Regime," paper delivered at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Colloquium Series,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Februry 18, 2004 (in Hall's possession).
29. Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic
Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York, 1991),
112-73; Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York, 1951), 100,
111-12; Karen Kruse Thomas, "Southern Racial Politics and Federal Health Policy
in the Careers of Three Southern Senators: Allen Ellender of Louisiana, Lister Hill of
Alabama, and Claude Pepper of Florida," paper delivered at the Organization of
American Historians Southern Regional Conference, Atlanta, GA, July 10, 2004 (in
Hall's possession).
30. Gavin Wright, "Economic Consequences of the Southern Protest Movement," in
New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, ed. Robinson and Sullivan, 174-78; Brown
et aI., Whitewashing Race, 72-73. On how mechanization undercut labor and
eliminated jobs for blacks, see Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 277-81.
31. Gavin Wright, "The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History," Journal of
Economic History 59 (June 1999): esp. 285. For the argument that much of the
South's continuing distinctiveness rests less on its history of racism than on its devo-
tion to the conservative economic tenets of racial capitalism, see ibid.
264 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

32. This paragraph draws on James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern
Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1980 (Baton Rouge, 1982); Schulman,
From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt; Brown, Race, Money, and the American Welfare State;
Lubell, Future of American Politics, 100, 111-12; Hanchett, Sorting Out the New
South City, 89-182,223-56; Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in
American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2001), 36-37; Dan T. Carter,
The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the
Transformation of American Politics (New York, 1995), 326-27, 399; Lassiter,
"Suburban Origins of 'Color-Blind' Conservatism," 549-82; and Jefferson Cowie,
"Nixon's Class Struggle: Romancing the New Right Worker, 1969-1973," Labor
History 43 (August 2002): 257-83. For a more sympathetic treatment of Nixon's
southern policies, see Dean J. Kotlowski, Nixon's Civil Rights: Politics, Principle,
and Policy (Cambridge, MA, 2001),1-43.
33. Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism; Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 6. In this essay I use the
term "civil rights unionism" to highlight the conjunction of race and class interests
in black- and Left-led unions and progressive organizations. On the Popular Front,
see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century (New York, 1996). Important early studies focused on civil rights
activism in the late 1930s and the 1940s. See, for example, Richard M. Dalfiume,
"The 'Forgotten Years' of the Negro Revolution," Journal of American History 55
(June 1968): 90-106; and Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence
of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York, 1978). Still, only in the 1990s did civil
rights historians begin to see the 1940s as a watershed comparable to the 1870s and
the 1960s. See, for example, Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil
Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, IL, 1993); Patricia Sullivan, Days of
Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Penny
M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Barbara Dianne Savage, Broadcasting Freedom:
Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (Chapel Hill, 1999); John Egerton,
Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in
the South (New York, 1994); Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United
Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955
(New York, 2003); Risa Lauren Goluboff, "The Work of Civil Rights in the 1940s:
The Department of Justice, the NAACP, and African-American Agricultural Labor"
(PhD diss., Princeton University, NJ, 2003); and Glenda Gilmore, "Defying Dixie:
African Americans and Their Allies, 1915-1945," book in progress (in Glenda
Gilmore's possession). For a contrary view of the 1940s as a decade of quiescence,
see Harvard Sitkoff, "African American Militancy in the World War II South:
Another Perspective," in Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the
American South, ed. Neil R. McMillen (Jackson, MS, 1997), 70-92.
34. On the 1940s as the beginning of an era in which progressives elevated race over
class, see Gary Gerstle, "The Protean Character of American Liberalism," American
Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1043-73; and Peter J. Kellogg, "Civil Rights
Consciousness in the 1940s," Historian 42 (no. 1, 1979): 18-41, esp. 22-25. For
contrary views of the decade, see Denning, Cultural Front, 467; and Goluboff,
"Work of Civil Rights."
35. Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 3; Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 16; Self, American
Babylon, 2-3,6; Alan Derickson, " 'Take Health from the List of Luxuries': Labor
and the Right to Health Care, 1915-1949," Labor History 41 (May 2000): 171-87.
36. What Alex Lichtenstein has called the "Southern Front" was signaled by union suc-
cesses in the region, a spike in National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) membership and voter registration among blacks, local
 Political Uses of the Past 265

activism by African Americans and white workers, and an influx into Washington
of prolabor, antiracist, southern New Dealers. See Alex Lichtenstein, "The Cold
War and the 'Negro Question, ' " Radical History Review 72 (Fall 1998): 186;
Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets,
1929-1959 (Charlottesville, VA, 1981); Linda Reed, Simple Decency and Common
Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963 (Bloomington, 1991);
Sullivan, Days of Hope; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism; and Egerton, Speak Now
against the Day.
37. According to the U.S. census of 1940, out of 12,672,971 African Americans,
8,873,631 lived in the eleven former Confederate states. University of Virginia
Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, United States Historical Census Data
Browser <http://fisher.lib.virginia.edulcensus/> (accessed September 2004).
38. Sullivan, Days of Hope; Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics: Race and the
Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1997),231-61; Brown, Race, Money,
99-134; Ira Katznelson, Kim Geiger, and Daniel Kryder, "Limiting Liberalism: The
Southern Veto in Congress, 1933-1950," Political Science Quarterly 108 (Summer
1993): 283-306; Korstad and Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost,"
786-811; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 4-5.
39. Dalfiume, "'Forgotten Years' of the Negro Revolution," 90-106; Biondi, To Stand
and Fight, 5; Korstad and Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost," esp. 787;
and Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle
for Equality (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
40. Nikhil Pal Singh, "CulturelWars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,"
American Quarterly 50 (September 1998): 474; Norrell, "One Thing We Did
Right," 68-69. For the statement on "world opinion," see Gilmore, "Defying
Dixie." Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign
Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Von Eschen, Race against Empire.
41. This discussion of labor feminism is drawn from Dorothy Sue Cobble, "Lost Visions
of Equality: The Labor Movement Origins of the Next Women's Movement," paper
delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians,
Washington, DC, April 13, 2002 (in Hall's possession), esp. 13; and Dorothy Sue
Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in
Modern America (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 8-9, 94-144, esp. 8. For an earlier use of the
term "labor feminism," see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "0. Delight Smith's Progressive
Era: Labor, Feminism, and Reform in the Urban South," in Visible Women: New
Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana,
IL, 1993), 166-98. For left feminism more generally, see Kate Weigand, Red
Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation
(Baltimore, MD, 2001); Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham
Du Bois (New York, 2000); Amy Swerdlow, "The Congress of American Women:
Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War," in U.S. History as Women's History:
New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish
Sklar (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995),296-312; Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the
Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern
Feminism (Amherst, MA, 1998),50-152; and Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political
Autobiography (Philadelphia, 2002), 256-74.
42. Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 4-11; Dalfiume, "'Forgotten Years' of the Negro
Revolution," 90-106; Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 4; Darlene Clark Hine, Black
Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Columbia, MO, 2003);
Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944); Amilcar Shabazz, Advancing Democracy:
African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in
Texas (Chapel Hill, 2004). On "parallelism," see Darlene Clark Hine, "Black
266 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,

1890-1950," Journal of American History 89 (March 2003):1280. On salary equal-
ization and the improvement of black schools in the 1940s and early 1950s, see
Sonya Ramsey, "More Than the Three R's: The Educational, Economic, and
Cultural Experiences of African American Female Public School Teachers in
Nashville, Tennessee, 1869-1893" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill, 2000); Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim
Crow (Athens, 2001), 58-60; Sarah Caroline Thuesen, "Classes of Citizenship:
The Culture and Politics of Black Public Education in North Carolina, 1919-1960"
(Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2003); and James J.
Heckman, "The Central Role of the South in Accounting for the Economic Progress
of Black Americans," American Economic Review 80 (May 1990): 242-46.
43. Frederickson, Dixiecrat Revolt, 7; Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 114-40; Nelson
Lichtenstein, "Union Strategies," Dissent 49 (Summer 2002): 75. For the battle over
the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), see also Merl E. Reed, Seedtime
for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair
Employment Practice, 1941-1946 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1991).
44. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American
Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000),12.
45. Anderson, Eyes off the Prize; Von Eschen, Race against Empire; Gerald Horne,
Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946-1956 (London, 1988); U.S.
Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United
Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro
People, ed. William L. Patterson (1951; New York, 1970); Mark V. Tushnet, The
NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-1950 (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1987); Goluboff, "Work of Civil Rights."
46. Frederickson, Dixiecrat Revolt; Carter, Politics of Rage.
47. Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the
South, 1948-1968 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004); Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner:
Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (New York,
2002); Chris Myers, "The Senator and the Sharecropper: James o. Eastland, Fannie
Lou Hamer, and the Struggle for Freedom at Home and Abroad" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in progress, in Hall's possession); Stacy
Braukman, "Anticommunism and the Politics of Sex and Race in Florida,
1954-1965" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1999); Stacy
Braukman, "'Nothing Else Matters but Sex': Cold War Narratives of Deviance and
the Search for Lesbian Teachers in Florida, 1959-1963," Feminist Studies 27 (Fall
2001): 553-75. For a prescient study of the 1950 election, "the first trial runs of a
Republican-Southern political alliance," in which North Carolina's Frank Porter
Graham and Florida's Claude Pepper were defeated, see Lubell, Future of American
Politics, 100-128, esp. 108.
48. David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Richard Moser, "Was It the End or Just a Beginning?
American Storytelling and the History of the Sixties," in World the Sixties Made, ed.
Gosse and Moser, 37-51. For an emphasis on the relative quiescence of the
institutional black church and the strategic brilliance, rather than the idealism, of
the movement's grassroots participants, see Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom.
See also Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black
Communities Organizing for Change (New York, 1984). For conflicting perspectives
on the religious basis of segregationist thought, see Chappell, Stone of Hope; and
Jane Dailey, "Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown," Journal of American
History 91 (June 2004): 119-44.
 Political Uses of the Past 267

49. Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South,
from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
50. For examples of the caricature, see Wall Street Journal, July 21,1999, p. Al2; Tamar
Jacoby, "A Surprise, but Not a Success," Atlantic Monthly 289 (May 2002): 114;
Raymond Wolters, "From Brown to Green and Back: The Changing Meaning of
Desegregation," Journal of Southern History 70 (May 2004): 321; and Ann Coulter,
"Racial Profiling in University Admissions," Human Events, April 9, 2001, p. 7. For
a contrary view, see Los Angeles Sentinel, March 31,1994, p. A4.
51. John A. Powell, "A New Theory of Integrated Education: True Integration," paper
delivered at the conference "The Resegregation of Southern Schools? A Crucial
Moment in the History (and the Future) of Public Schooling in America," University of
North Carolina Law School, Chapel Hill, NC, August 30, 2002 (in Hall's possession).
52. For an example of the "content of our character" mantra, see Wall Street Journal,
January 19, 1998, p. 1. For more accurate views of the March on Washington, see
Higginbotham, "Foreword," viii-xiv; Theoharis, "Introduction," 1-15; and Juan
Williams, "A Great Day in Washington: The March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom Was America at Its Best," Crisis 110 (July-August 2003): 24-30.
53. My gloss of this photograph draws on Green, "Race, Gender, and Labor in 1960s
Memphis," 465-89; and Nasstrom, "Down to Now." On the recent literature giving
attention to women and the cultural work of gender in the movement, see Michele
Mitchell, "Silences Broken, Silences Kept: Gender and Sexuality in African-American
History," Gender and History 11 (November 1999): 433-44; and Steven F. Lawson,
"Civil Rights and Black Liberation," in Companion to American Women's History,
ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Malden, MA, 2002),397-413.
54. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom, 404-17; Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the
Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill, 2003); John
D'Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York, 2003), 36;
Kathryn L. Nasstrom, Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances
Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Ithaca, NY, 2000). For Angela
Davis's statement, see Fosl, Subversive Southerner 10. Other black radicals, sidelined
by McCarthyism, took up artistic endeavors that influenced the political and aesthetic
imagination of generations to come. See Rebeccah E. Welch, "Black Art and Activism
in Postwar New York, 1950-1965" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2002).
55. Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 413-19. For the suggestion that such historical
amnesia extended to early voter registration drives, sit-ins, and legal battles, see
August Meier, "Epilogue: Toward a Synthesis of Civil Rights History," in New
Directions in Civil Rights Studies, ed. Robinson and Sullivan, 214-15; and
Nasstrom, "Down to Now." For an example of southern movement activists seeking
out the radical history they had been denied, see the thematic issue "No More
Moanin': Voices of Southern Struggle," Southern Exposure 1 (Winter 1974-1975).
The black studies and women's history movements were, in part, outcomes of this
search for historical roots.
56. For an influential expression of this view, see Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common
Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York, 1995). For a rejoin-
der, see Gosse and Moser, eds., World the Sixties Made; and Gosse, "Movement of
Movements," 278.
57. Sara M. Evans, "Beyond Declension: Feminist Radicalism in the 1970s and 1980s,"
in World the Sixties Made, ed. Gosse and Moser, 52-66, esp. 63; MacLean,
"Freedom Is Not Enough," introduction, chaps. 5, 7, and epilogue.
58. Robert Self, "'To Plan Our Liberation': Black Power and the Politics of Place in
Oakland, California, 1965-1977," Journal of Urban History 26 (September 2000):
759-92, esp. 787. See Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered)
268 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

(Baltimore, MD, 1998); Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka
(LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); Kathleen Cleaver
and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party:
A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York, 2001); Peniel E. Joseph,
"Black Liberation without Apology: Reconceptualizing the Black Power Movement,"
Black Scholar 31 (Fall-Winter 2001-2002): 2-19; and Self, American Babylon.
59. Theoharis and Woodard, eds., Freedom North; Gosse, "Movement of Movements,"
277-302.
60. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971); Lassiter,
"Suburban Origins of 'Color-Blind' Conservatism," 555.
61. Lassiter, "Suburban Origins of 'Color-Blind' Conservatism," 549-82, esp. 576. See
also Frye Gaillard, The Dream Long Deferred (Chapel Hill, 1988); and Davison M.
Douglas, Reading, Writing, and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Schools
(Chapel Hill, 1995). For the closing of black schools and other results of white con-
trol of the process of school desegregation, see David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom
Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South
(Chapel Hill, 1994); Barbara Shircliffe, We Got the Best of That World': A Case for
the Study of Nostalgia in the Oral History of School Segregation," Oral History
Review 28 (Summer-Fall 2001): 59-84; and James Leloudis, George Noblit, and
Sarah Thuesen, "What Was Lost: African American Accounts of School
Desegregation," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of
American Historians, Boston, MA, March 2004 (in Hall's possession).
62. Charlotte Observer, October 9, 1999, p. 19A; Pamela Grundy, "A Sense of Pride:
Segregation, Desegregation, and Community at West Charlotte High School," paper
delivered at the conference "Listening for a Change: Transforming Landscapes and
People," Southern Oral History ProgramINorth Carolina Humanities Council
Teachers' Institute, June 24-30, 2001, Chapel Hill (in Hall's possession); Pamela
Grundy, "Race and Desegregation: "'West Charlotte High School" <http://www.
ibiblio.orglsohp/researchllfadlfac_31 b.html> (accessed July 2004); Amy Stuart Wells
et aI., "How Desegregation Changed Us: The Effects of Racially Mixed Schools on
Students and Society: A Study of Desegregated High Schools and Their Class of 1980
Graduates" < http://cms.tc.columbia.edul i /a/ 782_ASWells041504.pdf > (accessed
November 2004); and Amy Stuart Wells et aI., In Search of Brown (Cambridge, MA,
2005). For the quotation about West Charlotte High School graduates' experiences,
see Arthur Griffin interview by Pamela Grundy, May 5, 1999, "Listening for a
Change: West Charlotte High School Project," series K, Southern Oral History
Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection (Wilson Library, University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill). A collection finding aid is available at
http://www.lib.unc.edulmss/inv.html (accessed September 2004).
63. For this dynamic in one southern county, see Pride, Political Use of Racial
Narratives, 244. For the reciprocal relationship between jobs and education, see
Wright, "Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History," 280. On black political
advances, see Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral
Politics, 1965-1982 (New York, 1985).
64. Carol B. Stack, Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South
(New York, 1996); Wright, "Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History," 281.
65. Sheryll Cashin, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining
the American Dream (New York, 2004), esp. 212; Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717
(1974); San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1 (1973);
Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation,
Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education
(New York, 1996); Gary Orfield and the Harvard Civil Rights Project, "Schools
 Political Uses of the Past 269

More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation," July 2001

<http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.eduiresearchidesegiSchools_More_Separate.
pdf> (accessed July 2004); James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A
Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York, 2001), 191-205;
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and
Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York, 2004), 751-89; John Charles
Boger, "Education's 'Perfect Storm'?: Racial Resegregation, High Stakes Testing, and
School Resource Inequities: The Case of North Carolina," North Carolina Law
Review 81 (May 2003): 1375-1462, esp. 1379; John Charles Boger, "Willful
Colorblindness: The New Racial Piety and the Resegregation of Public Schools,"
ibid., 78 (September 2000): 1719-96.
66. Cashin, Failures of Integration, 232-36, 11-12; Boger, "Education's 'Perfect
Storm'?"
67. Quintard Taylor, "The Civil Rights Movement in the American West: Black Protest
in Seattle, 1960-1970," Journal of Negro History 80 (Winter 1995-1996): 4-5;
Green, "Race, Gender, and Labor in 1960s Memphis," 465-89; Honey, "Labor and
Civil Rights Movements at the Cross-Roads"; Honey, Southern Labor and Black
Civil Rights; Michael K. Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of
Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA, 1999); Steve Estes,
"'I AM A MAN!': Race, Masculinity, and the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike,"
Labor History 41 (May 2000): 153-70; Self, American Babylon, 227, 291-327;
Gaines, "Historiography of the Struggle for Black Equality since 1945," 229; Self
and Sugrue, "Power of Place," 30-31.
68. For an astute overview, see William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America
since World War II (New York, 1995),236-43. For a critique of the Great Society'S
limitations, see Ira Katznelson, "Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?" in Rise
and Fall of the New Deal Order, ed. Gerstle and Fraser, 185-211. See also Jill
Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty
(New York, 1994).
69. This discussion of the struggle for economic inclusion is drawn from Nancy
MacLean, "Freedom Is Not Enough"; Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black
Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980
(Chapel Hill, 1999); Timothy J. Minchin, The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil
Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Wright,
"Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History"; Heckman, "Central Role of the
South in Accounting for the Economic Progress of Black Americans," 242-46;
Lichtenstein, State of the Union, 3; Cobble, Other Women's Movement, 180-205;
and Thomas J. Sugrue, "Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building
Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945-1969," Journal
of American History 91 (June 2004): 145-73.
70. Cowie, "Nixon's Class Struggle," 257-83, esp. 264; Jefferson Cowie, " 'Vigorously
Left, Right, and Center': The Crosscurrents of Working-Class America in the
1970s," in America in the Seventies, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence,
KS, 2004), 75-106; Joshua B. Freeman, "Labor during the American Century:
Work, Workers, and Unions since 1945," in Companion to Post-1945 America, ed.
Agnew and Rosenzweig, 202; Richard Moser, "Autoworkers at Lordstown:
Workplace Democracy and American Citizenship," in World the Sixties Made, ed.
Gosse and Moser, 289-315. For a remarkable instance of 1970s labor insurgency
(the basis for the Academy Award-winning film Norma Rae), see James A. Hodges,
"J. P. Stevens and the Union: Struggle for the South," in Race, Class, and Community
in Southern Labor History, ed. Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed (Tuscaloosa, AL,
1994),53-64.
270 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

71. Peter B. Levy, The New Left and Labor in the 1960s (Urbana, 1994); Keiran Taylor,
"A Turn to the Working Class: The New Left, Black Liberation, and the Struggle for
Economic Justice, 1968-1979" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill, in progress, in Hall's possession); Korstad and Lichtenstein, "Opportunities
Found and Lost," esp. 811.
72. See MacLean, "Freedom Is Not Enough," chap. 7; Lichtenstein, State of the Union,
195; Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor
(Ithaca, NY, 1999); Cowie, "'Vigorously Left, Right, and Center,'" 99-100;
Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (New York, 1984), 107-40;
and Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 228-70.
73. Brown et ai., Whitewashing Race, 164-92; Sugrue, "Affirmative Action from
Below," 172.
74. Deirdre English, "The Fear That Feminism Will Free Men First," in Powers of
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon
Thompson (New York, 1983), 477-83. Studies of women and the New Right
include Jane J. Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago, 1986); Donald G.
Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State
and the Nation (New York, 1990); Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War
against American Women (New York, 1991); Jane Sherron De Hart, "Gender on the
Right: Meanings behind the Existential Scream," Gender and History 3 (Autumn
1991): 246-67; Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (Berkeley,
CA, 1984); Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia, PA, 1987);
and Marjorie Julian Spruill, "Countdown to Houston: The 1977 International
Women's Year Conferences and the Polarization of American Women," paper deliv-
ered at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Houston, TX,
November 8, 2003 (in Hall's possession).
75. Brown et ai., Whitewashing Race, 80-85, 185-92, esp. 185. See also William A.
Darity Jr. and Samuel L. Myers Jr., Persistent Disparity: Race and Economic
Inequality in the United States since 1945 (Northampton, 1998); and William A.
Darity Jr. and Patrick L. Mason, "Evidence on Discrimination in Employment:
Codes of Color, Codes of Gender," Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (Spring
1998): 63-90. Recent Supreme Court decisions on minority contracting programs
have gone a long way toward gutting Title VII. See Richmond v. ]. A. Croson
Company, 488 U.S. 469 (1989); and Adarand Constructors v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200
(1995). Cf. Brown et ai., Whitewashing Race, 187-88.
76. MacLean, "Freedom Is Not Enough," chap. 9; Lichtenstein, State of the Union,
178-211. For a critique of the focus of civil rights organizations on enforcement of
Title VII that argues that job-training and antidiscrimination programs were poor
substitutes for economic planning to preserve well-paying blue-collar jobs, see Judith
Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of
Liberalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998). For a black labor leftist's view of the move-
ment's trajectory, 1950-1980, see J. Hunter O'Dell, "Notes on the Movement: Then,
Now, and Tomorrow," Southern Exposure 9 (Spring 1981): 6-11.
77. Martin Luther King Jr., "A Testament of Hope," in A Testament of Hope: The
Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San
Francisco, CA, 1986), 315. See also David Halberstam, "The Second Coming of
Martin Luther King," Harper's Magazine 235 (August 1967): 39-51.
78. Craig Haney and Philip Zimbardo, "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy:
Twenty-Five Years after the Stanford Prison Experiment," American Psychologist 53
(July 1998): 714; Joy James, ed., The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Malden, MA, 1998),
29-110.
 Political Uses of the Past 271

79. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed.

Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969),258.
80. For white attitudes as revealed in survey data, see Lawrence D. Bobo and Ryan A.
Smith, "From Jim Crow Racism to Laissez-Faire Racism: The Transformation of
Racial Attitudes," in Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group
Identities in America, ed. Wendy F. Katkin, Ned Landsman, and Andrea Tyree
(Urbana, IL, 1998), 182-220; Brown et aI., Whitewashing Race, 248-49; Pride,
Political Use of Racial Narratives, 238; Cokorinos, Assault on Diversity, 6. For evi-
dence that the Reagan administration's effort was not driven by, but drove, a change
in public opinion, see Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn: The Decline of
the Democrats and the Future of American Politics (New York, 1986),3-39.
81. Guinier and Torres, Miner's Canary, 11; Brown et aI., Whitewashing Race, 249.
82. Gosse, "Movement of Movements," 277-78.
 Other Articles Nominated for
the 2007 Competition

Dirlik Arif, "The End of Colonialism?" Boundary 2 (Spring 2005): 1-31.

Bruce E. Baker, "Lynch Law Reversed: The Rape of Lula Sherman, the Lynching of
Manse Waldrop, and the Debate Over Lynching in the 1880s" American Nineteenth
Century History 6 (September 2005): 273-29.
Rebecca Bales, "Winema and the Modoc War: One Woman's Struggle for Peace,"
Prologue 37 (Spring 2005): 24-35.
Alan C. Braddock, "'Jeff College Boys': Thomas Eakins, Dr. Forbes and Anatomical
Fraternity in Postbellum Philadelphia," American Quarterly 57 (June 2005): 355-83.
Kingsley M. Bray, "'We Belong to the North': The Flights of the Northern Indians from
the White River Agencies," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 55 (Summer
2005): 28-47.
Lynn E. Couturier, "The Influence of the Eugenics Movement on Physical Movement
Education in the United States" Sport History Review 36 (May 2005): 21-42.
Edward E. Curtis IV, "African-American Islamization Reconsidered: Black History
Narratives and Muslim Identity," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73
(Sept. 2005): 659-84.
Ruth Feldstein, "'I Don't Trust You Anymore': Nina Simone, Culture, and Black
Activism in the 1960s," Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1349-79.
Gretchen Heefner, "'A Symbol of a New Frontier': Hawaiian Statehood, Anti-Colonialism
and Winning the Cold War," Pacific Historical Review 74 (November 2005): 511-44.
Sean P. Holmes, "All the World's A Stage: The Actors Strike of 1919," Journal of
American History 91 (March 2005): 1291-1317.
Mark W. Janis, "Dred Scott and International Law," Columbia Journal of Transnational
Law 43, no. 3 (2005): 763-810.
S. J. Kleinberg, "Children's and Mothers' Wage Labor in Three Eastern U.S. Cities,
1880-1920," Social Science History 29 (Spring 2005): 45-76.
Dean Kotlowski, "With All Deliberate Delay: Kennedy, Johnson and School Desegregation"
Journal of Policy History 17, no. 2 ( 2005): 155-92.
Drew Lopenzina, " 'Good Indian': Charles Eastman and the Warrior as Civil Servant,"
American Indian Quarterly 27 (Summer-Fall 2003): 727-57.
Christopher Malone, "Race Formation, Voting Rights, and Democratization in the
Antebellum North," New Political Science 27 (June 2005): 177-98.
William G. Martin, "Global Movements before 'Globalization': Black Movements as
World-Historical Movements," Review: Fernand Braudel Center 28 no.1( 2005): 7-28.
Carolyn M. Moehling, "'She Has Suddenly Become Powerful': Youth Employment and
Household Decision-Making in the Early Twentieth Century," Journal of Economic
History 65 (June 2005): 414-38.
274 Other Articles Nominated for the 2007 Competition

W. Scott Poole, "Memory and the Abolitionist Heritage: Thomas Wentworth Higginson
and the Universal Meaning of the Civil War," Civil War History (June 2005): 202-17.
Matthias Reiss, "Bronzed Bodies Behind the Barbed Wire: Masculinity and the Treatment
of German Prisoners of War in the United States during World War II," Journal of
Military History 69 (April 2005): 475-504.
Laurence Shore, "The Enduring Power of Racism: A Reconsideration of Winthrop
Jordan's White Over Black," History and Theory 44 (May 2005): 195-226.
Josh Sides, "Excavating the Postwar Sex District in San Francisco," Journal of Urban
History 32 (March 2006): 355-79.
Whitney Walton, "Internationalism and the Junior Year Abroad: American Students in
France in the 1920s and 1930s," Diplomatic History 29 (April 2005): 255-78.
Reginald Washington, "Sealing the Sacred Bonds of Holy Matrimony: Freedmen's Bureau
Marriage Records," Prologue 37 (Spring 2005): 58-65.
Joan Waugh, " 'Pageantry of Woe': The Funeral of Ulysses S. Grant," Civil War History
51 (June 2005): 151-74.
Gray H. Whaley, "Oregon, Illahee, and the Empire Republic: A Case Study of American
Colonialism, 1843-1858," Western Historical Quarterly 36 (Summer 2005): 157-78.
Rachel Wheeler, "Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet," Journal of the
Early Republic 25 (Summer 2005): 187-220.
Charles Vert Willie and Sarah Susannah Willie, "Black, White, and Brown: The
Transformation of Public Education in America," Teachers College Record 107
(March 2005): 475-95.
 Index

"airmindedness" 185 Air Commerce Act 177, 178

"ambassadresses" 170 Air Mail Act (Kelly Act) 178, 183
"blood" or ancestry 203,214,223 airmail 178,179, 183, 184, 185,
"citizen philosophers" 93,96, 186, 187
101, 103 airport as commercial infrastructure
"colored" 214,215,217,218,219, 190
220,221,222 airport as public utility 190
"coolie" 113, 120, 128 airport as transportation facility 191
"coolie" trade 117,118,119,120, airport authorities 176,186,192
121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128 Airport News (Minneapolis) 189
"Double V" campaign 245 airport-parks 175,176,177,178,
"Far Horizon, The" 71 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186,
"Lewis and Clark: The Musical" 71,83 189-190, 193
"Lewis and Clark: The Opera" 71 Alabama 203
"manifest destiny" 129 Alien and Sedition Acts 58
"middle passage" 119 Allgor, Catherine 158, 163
"nation of immigrants" 129 Alvah, Donna 156, 158, 167
"passing" 199,200,202,216, American City (journal) 181
218,223 American Consular Bulletin 169
"racial capitalism" 242 American Institute of Park Executives
"racial integrity" 206,214,220,222 178,189
"stagflation" 255 Amoy 117,118
"U.S. Army Agency" 140 Andersonville 146, 149
"white flight" 241,254,159, 165, Andersonville National Cemetery 149
170; training of 166 Anglican-Episcopal Church, the 50,
64
Abbott, John S. C. 126 anti-Asian laws 112, 128, 129
abolitionism 53,95,97,98, 100, 112, anti-Semitism 245
115,116, 122, 126, anticolonialism 247
Acordada 29 anticommunism 247,248,255
adultery laws 203, 206 antidiscrimination efforts, federal
aerial sightseeing 188-189 243,246
Aero Club of Minneapolis 187 Antietam 138-139,143
affirmative action 238,242,243,246, antifascism 247
255,256 antimiscegenation laws 200,201,202,
Africa 247 203,204,205,206,207,209,210,
agency 14 211,213,214,220,222,223,224
276 Index

antislavery 95,96, 97 Biondi, Martha 244

Apaches 15, 17, 18, 19,20,21,22, birth certificates 201,202,215,216,
23,24,25,26,27,28,29,31,32, 218,220,221,222,223
33,35,36 Bitterroot Mountains 73
Arkansas 19, 32, 75 black nationalism 239
as hostesses 160,163,165-166; and black power movement 248,251
volunteer work 164; political black veterans 245
influence of 156, 157, 158, Black History Month 235
Association of American Foreign Black, J. S. 120
Service Women 164 Black Panthers 254
automobile 177,178,181,242 Blalock, David 208,209,210,211
Autry National Center 71, 72 Boeing Air Transport 186
aviation boosters 176,178, 182, 183, bonds 183, 184, 185, 187
185, 186 Boone, Daniel 75
aviation, commercial 176, 178, 179, Botta, Carlo 90
182, 183, 186, 189 Bourgmont, Etienne de 18
aviation, military 176,179, 187, Boyer, Jean Pierre 104
188, 191 Braden, Anne 249-251
Ayers, Edward 205-206 Breckinridge, John 58
Briggs, Lucy and Ellis 158, 160, 163,
Baker, Ella 249 166,168.169,170
BaltimorelWashington International Britain 89,90,92,93-94
Airport 192 British Anti-Slavery Society 114
Baptists, African American 59, 61, 65 British Guiana 113,114,115,125
Baptists, antislavery 48,49, 50, 53, Brooks, James F. 14
54,55,56,57,58,59,60, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
61,62,64 246,249
Baptists, Illinois 64 Brown v. Board of Education 209,
Baptists, Kentucky 47,50,51,55,56, 236,238,252,253
58,59,60,61,62,64,65,66 Bryson, Lesley 117, 118
Baptists, North Carolina 51, 53, 56 Buchanan, James 126, 127
Baptists, Ohio 64 Bureau of Air Commerce 177
Baptists, proslavery 59,60,63-64 burial units 138, 140
Baptists, Tennessee 56 Burton, Antoinette 157
Baptists, Virginia 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, busing 238, 243, 252
55, 56, 59, 66; Baptist General Butler, Benjamin 143
Committee of Virginia 50, 52, 54 Byrd, Richard 185
Bardaglio, Peter W. 202
barnstormers 176, 178, 179 Cabello, Domingo 35, 36
Barnwell, Robert 143 Cabellos Colorados 28, 29
Barrow, David 54, 56, 59, 60, 62, 64 Cable, George Washington 219
Barton, Clara 141-142,148, 149, Cabot, Elizabeth 163
151, 152 Caddos 13, 17, 19,20,21,22,23,
Battle of the Wilderness 13 8, 140 24,25,29,30,34,35
Beaulac, Willard 155, 157 California 111,125,182,211
Benjamin, Walter 257 Callen, Hilary 157
Bennett, Floyd 185 Canada 22
Bentham, Jeremy 90, 96 Canton (Guangzhou) 120, 122
Berlandier, Jean Louis 37 Carman, Joshua 64
Billouart de Kerlerec, Louis 21 Carter, Robert 55
 Index 277

Cass, Lewis 120 cold War 156,247,248

Central Association 140 colonization 97,98,101, 102, 103
Central Park 177 color blindness 201,238,239,248,
Chamberlain, Cyrus Foss 187 249,252,257
Chamberlin, Clarence 186 Columbia River 73
Chancellorsville 145 Columbia University's Teachers College
Charleston Mercury 137 252-253
Chicago 175, 193 Comanches 15, 19,20,21,23,25,
Chickasaw, the 100 26,29,30,32-33,34,35,36
child care, federally funded 245 Communists 200, 244, 246, 248
children 13,17, 18,24,26,28,29, concubinage 203,211,212,214
31,32,35,36-37,161,167,202, Confederacy 136, 139, 140, 143,
204,206,209,210,220 147, 148
Chinese Exclusion Act 129 Confederate States of America 127
Chitimachas 21 congregaciones 23
Christian Commissions 139 Congress 100,112,125,127,147,
Christian conversion 23 148,239,240,241,243,244,246
Christian, Marcus Bruce 199,200, Congress of American Women 245
211,212,213,219,224 Congress of Industrial Organizations
church associations 51, 52, 53, 54, 240,246
57,58,59,60,62,64,65 Congress of Racial Equality 254
church authority 48, 52, 65; versus Constitution 94, 209
civil authority 49,50, 52, 53, 63, Corps of Discovery 71, 72, 75, 82;
64,66 mission of 73; cost of 74;
citizenship 152 centennial of 82
City Planning (journal) 181 Costigliola, Frank 157
civil rights activists 237,247,248, Coward, Joan Wells 57
249-251,255 Crazy Horse 83
civil rights movement, long 240, 244, Creath, Jacob 56-57
246,258 Creole 218-219
civil rights movement, classical 235, Crows 83
237,248 Cuba 115,116,117,119,122,124,
civil rights unionism 244-246,251, 125, 126, 128, 129
252,256
Civil Aeronautics Act 190 Daley, Richard 175
Civil Rights Act 236,251,253,255 Dallas 179
Civil War 127,204 Davis, Angela Y. 249-251
Civil War casualties 136, 145 De Bow, J. D. B. 123, 124
Clapp, L. W. 182 death certificates 202,215
Clark, Jonathan 83 Delaware 202
Clark, William 71, 72, 76, 78, 80, 81, Delawares 75, 76, 78, 80
82,83,84 Democrats 204, 240, 243, 244, 246;
Clark, Meriwether Lewis 82 "Reagan Democrats" 255
Clarke, Gilmore D. 181 diplomats, American 156, 157, 158,
class 240,241,242,243,244, 159, 164, 165-166, 167
247,258 diplomats, British 156,158, 159, 162
Clay, Henry 99, 100 disease 23
Clingman, Thomas L. 124 disfranchisement 237
Cluett, Catherine 164 Dixiecrats 247-248
Cold Harbor 141 dog tags 135,140
278 Index

domesticity 157,158,162,163, 167, Fort Stevens 148

168, 169 Foster, John 160
Dominguez, Virginia 206,214,219 free people of color 203,215
Dort, Martha 146 French Revolution 90
Douglas, Susan 176
Dupas, Ralph and Peter 211 G.!. Bill of Rights 241
Dutisne, Claude-Charles 18 Gallay, Alan 14
Garrard, James 58
Early, Jubal 148 Garrison, William Lloyd 115
Eastland, James 248 gay rights movement 251
education, public 241,246,247 gender 156
EIJoyoso 25 General Orders #33 138
Elder, Glen 159 genizaros 24,28
Eliot, Thomas D. 125,127 Georgia 202, 203
emancipation 55, 57, 58, 59, 98, 99, Geronimo 83
101,102,103,104,113,116,117, Gettysburg 140,145,147,148
122,123,127,204 Giraud, Marcel 23
emigration, Chinese 120-121, Gladstone, John 113
128, 129 Godwin, William 90,103
Emmerson, Dorothy and John 159, Grant, Ulysses S., III 181
162,164,167,169,170 Granville, Jonathas 95
encomienda 23 graves registration 138,148
Enlightenment 91,92,93 Great Depression 186,244
Enloe, Cynthia 157, 160 Great Society 255
Eslinger, Ellen 59 Grew, Alice and Joseph 16
exhibition flying 176,178,179,183, Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of
185, 186, 187, 188, 192 Aeronautics 185
Experimental Aircraft Association Guillory, Monique 204
193 Guinier, Lani 236-237
Gulf War casualties 135
fair employment practices 252,
254,256 Haiti 95, 99, 102, 104
Fair Employment Practices Committee Hammond, James Henry 122
246 Harlem 249
family 167 Harmonie 97
federal airport subsidies 190-191 Harper's Weekly 140
Federal Bureau of Investigation 248 Hawai'i 116,117
Federal Housing Administration 241 Head Start 255
Fernandez de Santa Ana, Fray Benito health care, universal 244, 247
26-27 Heston, Charlton 71
Filipino immigrants 220-221 Hickman, William 56, 61
Fitzhugh, George 124 Higginbotham, A. Leon, Jr. 202
Flanagan, Maureen 157-158 Hitchcock, E. A. 143,145
Florida 203 Hoar, George F. 112
Ford Motor Company 185 Hochschild, Arlie 169
Foreign Service Personnel Board 155 Hoffman, Ronald 55
Foreign Service Spouse Oral History Holman, Charles 187
Program 164 Holmes, Donald 64
Fort Crook 184, 186 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 143
Fort Snelling 186 Holocaust 245
 Index 279

Hooker, Joseph 143 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 236, 238,

Hoover Commission 180 249,257
horses 25,26,30 kinship 15-16,20,21
House Committee on Un-American Kopytoff, Barbara K. 202
Activities 248 Korean War casualties 135
Hughes, Katherine 163 Korstad, Robert 244
Hummel, Joseph 184,185
la Harpe, Jean Baptiste Benard de 18
Illinois 182 La Bahia 24
incest 206 labor, "united" or cooperative 97,
India 113, 114, 125 99, 101
Indiana 97 labor feminism 245
Indianapolis 179, 187 Lafayette, Marquis de 89,96, 97, 98,
indios barbaros 25 99, 100
individualism 239,255 Lao Ch'ung-kuang 120
integration 248,252,253, Laqueur, Thomas W. 152
254,257 Ie Maire, Fran<;ois 22
integrationists 200 Le Moyne de Bienville, Sieur Jean-
intermarriage 15-16,17,21,22,27, Baptiste 19
31, 75 Leach, Mrs. R. L. 145
International Council of Air Shows Lee, Daniel 124
192 Lee, Robert E. 143,145
interracial marriage 203,204,205, Leland, John 51, 53
210,211,214,222,223 Lewis, Meriwether 71, 72, 74, 75, 76,
interracial sex 199,200,203,204, 77, 78
205-206,207,208,209,210,211, Liberator, The 115,119
212,213 Liberia 99, 102
Iraq War casualties 135 Lincoln, Abraham 112,127,147
Lindbergh, Charles 177,183,
Jackson, Andrew 99,100 186,188
Jefferson, Thomas 63, 72, 73, 74, 75, Littell's Living Age 115
90,94,97,99 London Literary Gazette 95
Jim Crow 208,210,212,238,242, Louisiana 13, 15, 17, 19,20,21,22,
245,249 23,27,30,31,32,199,200,203,
Johnson, Lyndon B. 254 204,206,207,213; French and
Jones, Claudia 245 Spanish influences on, 203, 204,
Jordan, Yvonne 161-162, 164, 165, 218-219,222,223
168,170 Louisiana Criminal Code, Article 79,
Josephine Ford, the 185 210
Joutel, Henri 17 Louisiana Soldiers Relief Association
Jumanos 24 140
Louisiana Supreme Court 206, 207,
Kansas 182 209,210,211,214,215,218,
Kansas Supreme Court. 182,183 220,222
Keene, Florence and Francis 155 Louisiana Territory 72, 74
Kemp, Anna Smith and Carl 161, Louisville 179
162,168,169,170 Loving v. Virginia 203, 206, 207, 222
Kentucky 56,57,58,63,182 lynching 211
Kentucky Abolition Society 64 Lyon, Elsie Grew and Cecil 163,166,
Kentucky Gazette 64 167,170
280 Index

Macao 122 Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan

Maclaran, Charles 96 Airports Commission 192
MacLean,~ancy 256 Minnesota ~ational Guard 187,188
Madison, Dolley 97 miscegenation 103,200,202,204,
Madison, James 90,97,99, 100 207,211,213,224
Manila 118 Mississippi 203
manumission 31 Mississippi River 75, 76
March on Washington 249 Missouri River 73, 75
marriage 103, 161,203,215,219 Missouri Territory 76, 79, 80;
marriage licenses 201,202,213,215, territorial assembly 80;
218,220,221,222,223 statehood 80
Marshall, Humphrey 116,117 Mitchell, Jane 145-146
Marshall, John 99 Moffat, Lilla Grew 167
Martin Luther King Jr. Day 235 Monroe, James 99
Marx, Leo 176 Montgomery bus boycott 249
Maryland 202 Monticello 97
Massachusetts 202 Moore, James 148,149, 151
Matthews, ~aomi Meffert and Bert Moore, R. Lawrence 49
159,164,166,169,170 Moore, Samuel Preston 136-137
Mauritius 113, 125 Morris, Celia 96
McCarthyism 248 motherhood 167
McConkey, Jenny 146 Mylne, James 91. 92
McMurray, Fred 71
Medicaid 255 ~ashoba 89,98,99,100, 101, 102,
Meigs Field 175 103, 104
Meigs, Montgomery 146 ~atchez 21
Memorial Association 148 ~atchitoches 22,30-31,32
Memorial Day 139 national cemeteries 135,147,149,
Methodists 49,55 151
mhissage (race-mixing) 200, 203 ~ational Air Races 186
Mexican War casualties 136 ~ational Association for the
Mexico 23, 24 Advancement of Colored People
military hospitals 136, 139, 247,248,249
141, 147 ~ational War Labor Board 244
military wives 156 ~ebraska 182
Millar, Robina Craig 92, 94 ~ew Deal 236,240,241,242,244,
Milliken v. Bradley 253 249,254,257
Milwaukee 179 ~ew Harmony 89, 102
Mine Run 141 ~ew Mexico 13, 17, 19,20,24,28,
Minneapolis 177,179,186,187,188, 30,36
189, 190, 191 ~ew Orleans 96,97,98, 128, 129,
Minneapolis Board of Park 199,206,211,213,218,219,
Commissioners 186,187,188, 221,223
190, 191 ~ew Right 236,237-238,239,251,
Minneapolis chapter, ~ational 255,256,257
Aeronautical Association 188 ~ewYorkCity 177,180
Minneapolis Civic and Commerce New York Times 116, 119, 126
Association 188 newspapers 138,140,142
Minneapolis Committee of One ~icholas, George 58
Hundred 188 ~ixon, E. D. 249
 Index 281

Nixon, Richard M. 243, 248 Perez v. Sharp 211

No Child Left Behind Act 254 Peru 126
Noah 62 Philippines 129
Nolen, John 181 philosophic radicalism 90, 104
North 236,237,238,239,240,243, pla(age 204
247,248,249,251-252,254,256 plantation 240
North Carolina 202 Playground and Recreation Association
Northwest Passage 73 of America 178,181
Notes on the State of Virginia 63 Pocahantas 83
Noyes, Dean 185 Pocahontas clause 206,215-216
Point Lookout 143
O'Shaughnessy, Edith 160-161,163, Poor People's Campaign 236
170 Popular Front 245,247,248
Office of Correspondence with the Posada, Alonso de 24
Friends of the Missing Men of the POW/MIA movement 135
United States Army 148 Presbyterian Church, the 50
Ohio River 74 Price, W. P. 138
Ohio Valley 75 Priest, Josiah 123
Oklahoma 19 Priestley, Joseph 90, 92
Old Right 238 prisioneros 26
Olmstead, Frederick Law 177, 178 Procida, Mary 156
Omaha 177,183,184,185,186 proslavery ideology 122, 123
Omaha Chamber of Commerce 184,
185, 186 quadroon balls 200, 203-204
Omaha chapter, American Legion Quakers 55
185, 186 Quarterly Review 96
Onesimus 62
Orobio y Bazterra, Prudencio de 28,29 race 200-201,202,203,207,213,
Osages 18,19, 76, 80 214,215,216,217,218,220,222,
Owen, Robert 89, 102, 103 223,224,240,241,244,247,254,
258
Pace v. State of Alabama 209 race war 98
Packer, Earl 155 radio technology 176
Page, Horace F. 111 rancherias 25
Page Law 129 Randolph, A. Philip 246
Palmer, Sarah 138 Rankin, Jeannette 157
Pangburn, Hampton 55 Rapp, George 97, 99
Papanek, Hanna 159 Raynal, Abbe Guillaume-Thomas-
park commissions 182,183, 186, Fran~ois de 22
187,188, 190, 191 Reagan, Ronald 239,252,256
Park District of Chicago 175 Reconstruction 204
Parker, Peter 117,118,119 recreation 176, 177, 178, 183,
parks 177,178 184-185
Pascoe, Peggy 201 Redemption 204
Pauley, Frances 249 Reed, Donna 71
Pavalko, Eliza 159 Reed, William B. 119, 124
peace medals 74 relief agencies 138, 139, 140
Peking (Beijing) 120 removal, Indian 81
Pennsylvania 92, 193, 202 Republican 239,240,243,248,
Pentagon 135 252,204
282 Index

republicanism 89,90,92,93,97, slaveholders 98,99, 101, 102, 104

101, 104 slavery 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 104,
resegregation 253-254,257 202,206
return migration 253 Slidell, John 125
Rice, David 58 Smedley, Beryl 162
Ripperda, Juan Maria de 33, 34, 35 Smith, Cyril Stanley 176
Robert Bowne, the 117,118, 123 Smith, George 55,64
Robinson, Charles 202, 203, 204, Smith v. Allwright 246
207 Snelling Field Corporation. 187,188
Rocky Mountains 74 social construction of technology 176
Rogers Act 155, 156, 160, 161 South 201,203,236,237,238,239,
Ronald Reagan Washington National 240,241,242,243,244,247,248,
Airport 192 249,252,253,254,255,256
Roosevelt, Eleanor 157 South Carolina 202, 203
Roosevelt, Franklin D. 244,246 South Carolina Relief Depot 140
Roosevelt, Theodore 156, 160 Southern boosterism 243
Rosenberg, Emily 157 Southern Oral History Program
Rotter, Andrew 157 252-253
runways, paved 178, 191 Soviet Union 247
Rush, Benjamin 92 St. Louis 71, 72, 75, 82
Rustin, Bayard 235,249 St. Louis Opera Company 71
St. Paul 186,187, 188
Sacagawea 14, 71, 82, 83, 84 Stanton, Edwin 149
Saks,Eva 200,215,224 State Department 247
Salmon, Lucy 168 State of Louisiana v. Brown and
San Antonio de Bexar 24, 26, 28, Aymond 208,209,210,211,
33,34 214,222
San Antonio Independent School State [of Louisiana] v. Treadaway et al.
District v. Rodriguez 253 214
Sanitary Commission 139 State [of Louisiana] v. Harris 208
Santa Maria y Silva, fray Miguel 13, State [of Louisiana] v. Daniel 208
16,32 Stoler, Ann 157
school desegregation 199,222,252, Strobel, Margaret 157, 168
253,254 Struble, Henry 13 8
Scotsman, The 96 Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Scott, Fanny 143,145 Committee 249
Second Manassas 138 suburbanization 240,241,242,243
segregation 200,201-202,204,205, Succession of Lannes 211
207,212,219,220,222,223,236, suffrage 93,96
237,239,240,241,242,243,246, Sugrue, Thomas 256
247,249,252 Sumner, Charles 129
sharecropping 240 Sunseri v. Cassagne 214-218,219,
Shawnees 75, 76, 78, 80, 81 222
Sitting Bull 83 Supreme Court 246,253
slave trade, African 13, 14,21,22, Sutton, John 58, 60
53,113,114,115,116,117,119, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board
120, 123, 124, 125 of Education 252
slave trade, Indian 14,15,16,18,19,
20,21,22,23,24,26,30,32-33, Taft-Hartley Act 246
35,36,37-38 Tarrant, Carter 56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64
 Index 283

Tecumseh 78 Vesey, Denmark 98

Ten Eyck, John C. 127 Vietnam War 236
Tennessee 89, 100,205 Vietnam War casualties 135, 136
Texas 13,15,19,20,23,24,28,30, Views of Society and Manners in
32,36 America 93,95,97,104
theology of equality 48, 50, 62, 63, Villa v. Lacoste 220-222
65 Virginia 202, 203, 206
Thurmond, Strom 246 voter registration 246
Time 71 Voting Rights Act 236,251,253
Times-Picayune (New Orleans) 211,
213 Wagner Act 245
Tonti, Henri de 17 Wallace, George C. 248
Tories 90,95 Wallace, Henry 247
Torres, Gerald 236-237 Wallenstein, Peter 203
trade, French-Indian 17-20,21,22, War of 1812 78
23,30,31,32-33,74,75,81-82 War on Poverty 254
trade, Spanish-Indian 23, 24, 30, Ward, John E. 121, 122
32-33,36,37 warfare, Spanish-Indian 25,26,
Tregle, Joseph G., Jr. 219 29,35
Trinidad 115, 125 Washington D.C. 93,97, 158
Truman, Harry S. 247 Waverly, the 118,123
Twin City Aero Corporation 187,188 Weatherly, T.]. 142
Twin City Motor Speedway 186, 188 Weir, L. H. 178, 181
welfare system 240-241,243,244
u.S. Colored Troops 150-151 West 239,240,248
U.S. Foreign Service 155, 156, 157, West Charlotte High School
158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 252,253
168,170 wives 155-170; and West Indies 113,114,115,116,
clothing 162,163; and domestic 125, 126
servants 167, 168, 169; Wexler, Laura 157
U.S. Navy 176 white supremacy 239,242
U.S. State Department 156, 158, 160, White Citizens' Council 200
161, 162, 163 Whitman, Thomas 64
U.S. Supreme Court 203, 207, 209 Wichita 182,183,189
Ulibarri, Juan de 17 Wichitas 13,15,17,18,19,20,21,
unemployment insurance 241 23,24,25,26,29,30,32-33,34,
union democracy movement 255 35,36
Union 136,139,140,143,147,148, Willett, Joseph 138
149,151 Wills, Garry 147
unions 245 Wilson, Woodrow 170
United Nations 247 Wirth, Theodore 189,192
United States Conference of Mayors Wisconsin 182
190 Wold, Ernest G. 187
United States Magazine 122 Wollstonecraft, Mary 90
urban recreation movement 178 women 14,21,23,26,28,32,37,
utopia 92,93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 54,61,65,96,97,75,103,146,
100, 101, 102, 103, 104 148,152,155,156,157,158,
159,161,202,203,209,
Van Sant Airport 193 211-212,239,240,241,245,
Vaux, Calvert 177 249,251,255
284 Index

women's rights movement 251,256 World War II 156, 176,236,240,241

woman suffrage 156 World War II casualties 135
Work Projects Administration. 190 Wormeley, Katherine 141
workers'rights 239,243,244,245, Wright, Camilla 91,92,96,97
246,254,255,256 Wright, Frances 89-104
World War! 187
World War I casualties 135, 136, York 71,72,83,84
145, 151 Young, Clarence M. 181