In his conversation with David Thomson, Link discusses events in Civil War Atlanta and important figures in the rebuilding of the city. He also talks about his approach to teaching the Civil War. (running time: 16:36)

[This article is crossposted at UNCPressBlog.com.]

Today we welcome a guest post from William A. Link, author of Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath. After conquering Atlanta in the summer of 1864 and occupying it for two months, Union forces laid waste to the city in November. William T. Sherman’s invasion was a pivotal moment in the history of the South and Atlanta’s rebuilding over the following fifty years came to represent the contested meaning of the Civil War itself. The war’s aftermath brought contentious transition from Old South to New for whites and African Americans alike. In Atlanta, Cradle of the New South, Link argues that this struggle defined the broader meaning of the Civil War in the modern South, with no place embodying the region’s past and future more clearly than Atlanta.

In the following post, Link briefly depicts the great destruction Atlanta faced at the end of the Civil War and how it embraced a new narrative as the flagship of the “New South.”

###

A little more than a year from now, we will be commemorating the 150^th anniversary of William T. Sherman’s conquest of Atlanta in September 1864. This was a crucial moment in the Civil War which helped to defeat the Confederacy and assure Union victory. To be sure, the Atlanta Campaign had much to do with the shaping of the South’s vision of itself. Sherman’s invasion also defined the character, shape, and purpose of Atlanta for the next century and more.

Atlanta hadn’t been much of a city prior to secession, with about 10,000 in inhabitants in 1860. The town didn’t exist prior to 1847, when the village of Marthasville began to call itself Atlanta. For much of its antebellum history, the town struggled to define itself against a reputation for lawlessness and social disorder.

The Civil War remade Atlanta, which became the most important wartime center for the western Confederate armies. Its position as a central railroad depot, manufacturing, supply, military, and hospital center set it apart. Fortunes were made; housing and commodities were at a premium. In addition, the war provided new opportunities for African Americans to acquire property, assert greater economic autonomy, and begin to build the foundation of a new, free community. The Civil War thus began Atlanta’s emergence as a major southern urban center.

At the same time, the Civil War brought destruction and devastation to Atlanta. During their evacuation of the city in September 1864, Confederate military forces destroyed the remaining military stores in the city, while they burned the transportation center. Sherman burned much of the city when he left it two months later. Sherman aide Henry Hitchcock described “tongues of flame . . . huge waves of fire” which rolled “up into the sky” and with “the skeletons of great warehouses” standing out “in relief against and amidst sheets of roaring, blazing, furious flames.”

There were few cities in the occupied South suffering as much devastation as Atlanta, but destruction provided a basis for the city’s future growth. Indeed, the “New South”—a social construction fashioned in the 1880s—rested on the ability of a city such as Atlanta to embrace a clean slate and to reinvent its future. Atlanta’s white boosters embraced a new narrative about the city’s past which wiped clean the slaveholding past and adopted a message of openness to investment by northern capitalists. Wartime destruction became an emblem of Atlanta’s embrace of modernity, its ability to fashion itself as a resurgent phoenix leading toward a New South future. “As ruin was never before so overwhelming,” New South enthusiast and booster Henry W. Grady announced in December 1886, “never was restoration swifter.”

###

William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida. He is author or editor of thirteen books, including Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism and Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia.

While fighting his way toward Atlanta, William T. Sherman encountered his biggest roadblock at Kennesaw Mountain, where Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee held a heavily fortified position. The opposing armies confronted each other from June 19 to July 3, 1864, and Sherman initially tried to outflank the Confederates. His men endured heavy rains, artillery duels, sniping, and a fierce battle at Kolb’s Farm before Sherman decided to directly attack Johnston’s position on June 27. Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign, by Earl J. Hess, tells the story of an important phase of the Atlanta campaign.

The following excerpt comes from the book’s Preface (pp. xii-xvi). Here, Hess explains how the nearly three weeks of battle at Kennesaw Mountain in the face of unyielding natural elements stand historically as a pivotal representation of military strategy and adaptation for both the Union and Confederate generals.

###

Six weeks after setting out from Chattanooga in early May, 1864, Major General William T. Sherman hit a massive roadblock while fighting his way toward Atlanta. Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee was heavily fortified along a line that stretched across the Georgia countryside, anchored on the twin peaks of Kennesaw Mountain near Marietta. It was the ninth fortified position Johnston had created thus far in the campaign, and it proved to be the most difficult to bypass. For two weeks, from June 19 to July 3, Sherman tried to find a way to turn Johnston’s left flank. Both armies were stretched to the breaking point in their extended positions as artillery duels, constant sniping, and a fierce battle or two erupted. As the two sides tested each other, heavy rains descended, and the dirt roads of Georgia became quagmires. Frustrated at the delay, Sherman decided to try a major frontal assault against three points of Johnston’s line on June 27. The Federals who survived that day would remember the attack for the rest of their lives.

The assault of June 27 was a significant departure from Sherman’s mode of operations during the Atlanta campaign. He had more often maneuvered parts of his massive force, an army group consisting of available troops from the departments of his Military Division of the Mississippi, in order to turn enemy flanks and force the Confederates out of their trenches. Sherman did mix attacks with his turning strategy at Dalton, Resaca, New Hope Church, and Pickett’s Mill, but most of those assaults had been exploratory efforts to find and develop enemy lines and take advantage of opportunities that occurred. On June 27, the Federals knew what to expect and were hitting a heavily fortified, well-manned position. It was, in a way, an experiment, and Sherman arrived at the decision after many days of deliberation.

Sherman threw eight brigades of veteran troops, some fifteen thousand men, at three locations along the heavily fortified Confederate line on June 27. They failed to make a dent in the defenses, losing about three thousand casualties in the process. Only at one location, a small rise of ground that came to be called Cheatham’s Hill, did the Federals stay close to the Confederate works after their attack. They dug new field works within yards of the Rebels. Here they stayed for the remainder of the Kennesaw phase of the Atlanta campaign, sniping, digging a mine with the intention of blowing up an angle in the Confederate works, and cooperating with their enemy in burying the many bodies of Union men killed in the attack. When Sherman resumed his practice of flanking Johnston out of his works, the Confederates evacuated the Kennesaw Line on the night of July 2 and retired a few miles to the next fortified position. The Chattahoochee River, the last natural barrier to Sherman’s approach to Atlanta, lay only a short distance farther south.

The purpose of this book is to tell the story of Kennesaw Mountain in the Atlanta campaign. It is based on extensive research in archival collections and published primary sources. The works of previous historians who have written on the campaign is also incorporated for context. Special attention is devoted to the engagements at Kolb’s Farm on June 22 and Sherman’s assault on June 27. The battlefield itself presented a valuable resource for understanding the action around Kennesaw in late June and early July 1864. Although the area where Sherman’s right wing tried to find and flank Johnston’s left has been developed, the ground within the park is well preserved. The locations of the three attacks on June 27 are in a natural state, even if the site of the battle of Kolb’s Farm is a mix of natural landscape and housing development.

The aim of this book is not only to describe the actions along the Kennesaw Line but to explain the significance of the Kennesaw phase of the Atlanta campaign and understand the outcome of operations along the line. By necessity, it is a study of high-command problems, decisions, and triumphs on both sides of no-man’s-land. But it is also a story of common soldiers enduring and adjusting to the special rigors of continuous contact with the enemy, living within holes while spring weather did its worst overhead. The endurance of the Federal rank and file was most severely tested by the order to approach well-constructed earthworks filled with Confederate soldiers, and the attack of June 27 serves as an excellent case study of the experience of battle. The use of field fortifications on the minor tactical and the larger strategic level is a major feature of this story, and the failure of column formations to give the Federals an advantage in their risky assault is highlighted. Sherman’s recurrent fights with newspaper correspondents came into play during the Kennesaw phase of the Atlanta campaign, and neither he nor Johnston could ever forget that higher-level authorities in Washington and Richmond kept watch over their every move. For Sherman, Kennesaw was a dangerous phase of his career, a time when he feared that weather conditions and Confederate fortifications had slowed his advance so much that Johnston might send reinforcements to General Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia. For Johnston, Kennesaw represented the best evidence he could muster to prove that his Fabian tactics were working to slow the Union advance into Georgia and were punishing the enemy with heavy casualties. There was much to be gained or lost for both commanders, depending on how this phase of the struggle for Atlanta came out.

“The most severe and trying experiences of the Campaign,” remembered John C. Arbuckle of the Fourth Iowa, “were those we endured in the trenches in front of Kennesaw. For 26 days, 17 of which were days of continuous rain, we never had our clothes off, or a chance to wash.” For Arbuckle, and for thousands of other men in blue and gray, Kennesaw Mountain loomed large in the lexicon of battle as much for its challenges to the campaigning life of the common soldier as for its threat of injury and death from bullets or shell fragments. “Such was our condition and personal appearance from grime, mud and burnt powder,” Arbuckle concluded, “that we were all but a fright to ourselves.”^[1]

Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park is one of the most valuable Civil War resources in the country. I first became acquainted with its riches in the summer of 1986 while traveling from West Lafayette, Indiana, to my first teaching appointment at the University of Georgia. On visiting the park, I was impressed by the remnants of earthworks preserved within its boundaries. Those earthworks in a sense haunted me, for they were the first major collection of these relics of Civil War military operations I had seen. During the course of my one-year stay at the University of Georgia, I made many trips to Kennesaw to study the system of fortifications, take field notes, and expose many photographs. This experience resulted in a major research project (still ongoing) to write books about Civil War field fortifications. It also eventually led to the writing of this battle book.

The significance of the ground enclosed within the Kennesaw Mountain Park cannot be overstated. It contains the most important collection of surviving Civil War earthworks in the Western Theater, remnants that are as important as those in the best battlefield parks of the Eastern Theater. It is remarkable that the large park at Kennesaw is perched so close to the con-urban expanse of Atlanta. If not for the veterans who initiated preservation efforts in the 1890s, and the efforts of those who followed them, the battlefield would likely be under concrete, houses, and commercial buildings by now.

###

From Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign by Earl J. Hess. Copyright © 2013 by Earl J. Hess.

1. ^[1] Arbuckle, Civil War Experiences, 65. ↩

[This article is crossposted at UNCPressBlog.com.]

We welcome a guest post today from Michael T. Bernath, author of Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South, which is now available in a new paperback edition. During the Civil War, some Confederates sought to prove the distinctiveness of the southern people and to legitimate their desire for a separate national existence through the creation of a uniquely southern literature and culture. Bernath follows the activities of a group of southern writers, thinkers, editors, publishers, educators, and ministers—whom he labels Confederate cultural nationalists—in order to trace the rise and fall of a cultural movement dedicated to liberating the South from its longtime dependence on northern books, periodicals, and teachers. Bernath makes provocative arguments about the nature of Confederate nationalism, life within the Confederacy, and the perception of southern cultural distinctiveness.

In the following guest post, Bernath highlights April 28 as the sesquicentennial anniversary of delegates from the Confederate states forming the South’s first and only national teachers’ organization.

###

2013 will mark many of the Civil War’s most famous sesquicentennial anniversaries—January 1 (Emancipation Proclamation), May 10 (Stonewall Jackson’s death), July 3 (Pickett’s Charge), July 4 (the fall of Vicksburg), November 19 (Gettysburg Address), just to name a few. By contrast, April 28 will pass with little notice (except perhaps among the most dedicated Civil War buffs  interested in the fight at Choctaw Bayou, Louisiana). It was on that day, however, one hundred and fifty years ago, in Columbia, South Carolina, that nearly seventy delegates from six Confederate states met to form the South’s first and only national teachers’ organization, The Educational Association of the Confederate States of America.

Over the course of three days, the men (membership was restricted to male Confederate citizens) of the newly founded Association drew up a constitution, elected officers, and passed a series of resolutions that were then distributed and reprinted throughout the Confederacy. Their stated purpose was to aid the South in casting off its longtime dependence on northern textbooks and northern teachers and to ensure that a victorious Confederacy emerged from the war with both its political and its intellectual independence intact. Theirs was an essential component, a separate front, of the larger war effort against the North, and they resolved “That the unexampled heroism and devotion of our soldiers, imperatively demand of those to whom is committed the mental and moral development of our infant Republic, corresponding exertions in their appropriate sphere,” the schoolroom.^[1] It was there that the “mind of the State” would be properly prepared so that while “the casualties of war are carrying off the present adult generation . . . those who are to succeed them should be able to appreciate the greatness of the trusts committed to their hands.” Thus these southern educators directed their attention to their new nation’s future, even as soldiers and politicians fought for its immediate survival.

At their meeting, the delegates discussed teacher training for native-born southerners and the establishment of statewide public education systems (still a relative rarity in the South), but their primary focus was encouraging the rapid wartime production of southern-authored and southern-published textbooks. Confederate independence required that southerners no longer depend on their enemies for their books and that southern children no longer be exposed to the poisons suspected to lurk within those pages. “Considering our former dependence for books, for teachers and for manufacturers, on those who now seek our subjugation, it is especially incumbent on this Association to encourage and foster a spirit of home enterprise and self-reliance,” these educators declared, and they pledged “to encourage our own citizens by every means in our power, to prepare and publish suitable text-books for our schools; and in all cases where such books are of equal merit with foreign works, to give them the decided preference.” To this end, the delegations presented reports on the textbooks recently published or in preparation in their respective states, compiling an impressive list of sixty-one titles.

Dignitaries from across the South sent letters of support. Confederate  president Jefferson Davis, for instance, assured the delegates that their “object commands my fullest sympathy, and has, for many years, attracted my earnest consideration. It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of primary books in the promotion of character and the development of mind. Our form of Government is only adapted to a virtuous and intelligent people, and there can be [no] more imperative duty of the generation which is passing away, than that of providing for the moral, intellectual and religious culture of those who are to succeed them.” North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance likewise congratulated the educators “that the desolation of war does not prevent the good men of the country from looking after this great and important matter. This is certainly the time to inaugurate the system of supplying our schools with our own books, and of impressing the minds of our children with the effusions of Southern genius.” Theirs was a cause “so patriotic,” he concluded, as “to be commended by every true Southern heart.”

Having adjourned on April 30, the members of the Educational Association of the Confederate States of America vowed to reconvene on September 2, 1863 in Atlanta. The difficulties of war, however, prevented it. Nevertheless, the organization did  manage to assemble one last time before the southern nation that gave it purpose collapsed—meeting for one day on November 9, 1864, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Travel had become ever more difficult in the shrinking Confederacy, and most delegates, not surprisingly, hailed from the host state.

Ultimately, the significance of the Educational Association of the Confederate States of America lay more in what it symbolized than what it accomplished. These southern educators fought a different war for Confederate independence, one that in their view would legitimate southern nationhood and ensure the Confederacy’s future.  They sought to separate the South from the North culturally as well as politically. In the end, their struggle for Confederate educational independence was inextricably linked to the war itself and their national organization could not survive without a nation. April 28, then, if it is to be commemorated, is to be remembered as a moment of optimism, a day when a group of white southern educators came together to imagine a great national future.

Michael T. Bernath is Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor in American History at the University of Miami and author of Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South.

1. ^[1] All quotations from Proceedings of the Convention of Teachers of the Confederate States, Assembled at Columbia, South Carolina, April 28th, 1863 (Macon, GA: Burke, Boykin & Co., 1863): Available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/teachers/menu.html. ↩

[This article is crossposted at UNCPressBlog.com.]

We welcome a guest post today from Rod Andrew Jr., author of Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer, which is now available in a new paperback edition. One of the South’s most illustrious military leaders, Wade Hampton III was for a time the commander of all Lee’s cavalry and at the end of the Civil War was the highest-ranking Confederate cavalry officer. Andrew’s critical biography sheds light on Hampton’s central role during Reconstruction as a conservative white leader, governor, U.S. senator, and Redeemer; his heroic image in the minds of white southerners; and his positions and apparent contradictions on race and the role of African Americans in the New South.

In the following guest post, Andrew discusses South Carolina’s 1876 gubernatorial election and the six months that Democrat Wade Hampton and Republican Daniel Chamberlain simultaneously claimed victory.

###

On November 28, 1876, Wade Hampton, self-proclaimed governor of South Carolina, prevented a bloody riot at the South Carolina state house. Five thousand of his armed supporters were preparing to overwhelm the thin line of federal troops surrounding the edifice and violently depose the other claimant to the office, the incumbent Republican “carpetbagger” Daniel Chamberlain. Confidently and calmly, Hampton asked his followers to disperse, promising that his cause would triumph by peaceful means. In a sense, Hampton’s speech protected the physical safety of his rival. But it also bolstered Hampton’s claim of his right to govern—not just among white Democrats, but also in the minds of Republicans inside and outside the state. By proving that he had the power to unleash violence but also to restrain it, Hampton fulfilled society’s expectations of the southern patriarch, and of his generation’s longings for order in a chaotic time in the nation’s history.

The contrast between the two candidates was clear. Hampton had been a wealthy slaveowner, the scion of one of the state’s most prominent antebellum families, and its most prominent and beloved military leader in the Civil War. His claims to leadership rested on his social status, his soldierly reputation, and the old paternalism that looked to men like him as natural leaders and protectors, and as competent wielders of force. Chamberlain was an outsider from Massachusetts. Because of the recent enfranchisement of black men, his Republican Party had been able to dominate the state’s politics for nearly a decade. Both men, interestingly, tried to position themselves as champions of order and “good government.” Hampton sought to overthrow the corrupt Republican regime in Columbia and promised to protect black civil rights; Chamberlain had tried to bring reform and publicly dismissed Hampton’s promises to black voters.

It was one of the most corrupt and violent campaigns in American electoral history. Both sides cheated and sought to intimidate their rivals—Hampton’s Democrats, though outnumbered, were far better at it. In nearly every town where Hampton spoke, he was accompanied by “Red Shirts”—armed men marching on foot or on horseback. Hampton spoke of a return to honor and principle in government; he promised peace, and the Red Shirts committed no violence in his presence. Elsewhere they could be murderous, threatening individual Republicans and provoking deadly riots. Indeed Hampton worried that the violence would justify President Grant sending large numbers of federal troops to the state, thereby proving that only the Republicans could preserve order. On Election Day, November 8, armed Red Shirts patrolled polling sites, stuffed ballot boxes, and allowed white men to cross over from Georgia and North Carolina to vote for Hampton. The vote for Hampton in some counties exceeded the number of eligible voters in the most recent census. There were also irregularities by Republicans in lowcountry, black-majority districts, but not enough to prevent a higher total count for Hampton. Ironically, the election was being stolen by Democrats who excoriated Republican corruption.

The resulting political confusion lasted for nearly six months. The state legislature had the authority to certify the results of the gubernatorial election, but because of obvious irregularities, two rival legislatures claimed legitimacy. At one point they literally sat side by side in the state house and attempted to conduct business simultaneously. The state “Board of Canvassers” sided with Chamberlain; the state supreme court supported Hampton. The commander of the U.S. Army garrison, General Thomas Ruger, protected Republican claims. When Ruger’s troops blocked Democratic claimants to the legislature from entering the state house on November 28, Hampton’s cause seemed lost to many of his seething supporters. Thousands of them surrounded the state house. Nervously, Chamberlain consulted with Ruger and the two of them agreed to ask Hampton to defuse the situation—he apparently was the only man who could.

Over four more months would pass before Hampton would finally take possession of the state house. But Hampton’s dramatic act of crowd control on November 28 set the tone. Though Chamberlain’s regime was safe within the ring of bayonets surrounding the state house, everyone in South Carolina and beyond came to believe Hampton really held the reins of power. Hampton dispersed another angry crowd on December 6. Agents of his government began collecting taxes, while Chamberlain was almost powerless to do so. Hampton appointed officers of black and white militia units, pardoned criminals, and offered rewards for the apprehension of others. The riotous Red Shirts, if they had been beyond Hampton’s control during the campaign, now quietly heeded his orders to maintain the peace. Republican leaders in the state, sitting President Grant, and incoming President Rutherford B. Hayes judged that Hampton was in control. On April 3, 1877, Hayes ordered Ruger’s troops out of Columbia, essentially recognizing Hampton as governor.

Hampton, the restorer of “order,” ironically been the symbolic leader of a violent campaign in 1876. The relative peace he brought to Reconstruction-era South Carolina, in the end, was only maintained by the steady erosion of black civil rights over the next two decades. But Republicans at the national level were disgusted with corruption in South Carolina in 1876-77 and their enthusiasm for protecting African American citizenship had waned. Even a number of black South Carolinians seemed ready for a change and voted for Hampton. One, later a Hampton appointee, said “God only knows what would have become of us if things had kept on the way they were going.” Twenty-five years later, Chamberlain himself, recognizing Hampton as a “natural leader,” praised his character and his “mingled prudence and aggressiveness.” Thus, the old southern patriarch, the warrior who seemed capable of delivering peace, emerged as the man of the hour. The Old South had been defeated, but many of its values and its leaders, for better or worse, still ruled.

Rod Andrew Jr. is professor of history at Clemson University and a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He is author of Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer and Long Gray Lines: The Southern Military School Tradition, 1839-1915.

We welcome a guest post today from Stanley Harrold, author of Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, which is now available in a new paperback edition. During the 1840s and 1850s, a dangerous ferment afflicted the North-South border region, pitting the slave states of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri against the free states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Aspects of this struggle—the underground railroad, enforcement of the fugitive slave laws, mob actions, and sectional politics—are well known as parts of other stories. In Border War, Harrold explores the border struggle itself, the dramatic incidents that it comprised, and its role in the complex dynamics leading to the Civil War.

In the following guest post, Harrold reveals similarities in the struggles over legal status of enslaved people seeking freedom in the mid-1800s and some immigrants to the U.S. today.

###

Slave escapes from the South to the North and Canada happened frequently during the decades prior to the Civil War. Such escapes had a major role in causing the war. From the 1830s through the 1850s, people (North and South, black and white) called the escapees fugitive slaves or runaway slaves. Of the two terms, I prefer the former. Runaway seems demeaning. It suggests triviality or that the slaves deserted masters who deserved loyalty. Some who study the slave escape networks known collectively as the underground railroad go further. They object to using the term slaves and prefer enslaved people. They call slaves who left their masters to head north freedom seekers.

During the pre-Civil War decades, people did not use the term freedom seekers. The closest that I have found in antebellum sources is freedom-hunters. Radical antislavery journalist Joshua Leavitt of Boston used this term in 1841, as he contrasted the escapees with slave-hunters who sought to capture and re-enslave them. What is important for both freedom seekers and freedom-hunters is their emphasis on slave action in gaining freedom. By escaping north, they forced the slavery issue on the nation.

Illegal immigrant, like freedom seeker, is a term that did not exist in the Civil War era. Yet, better than freedom seeker, when applied to fugitive slaves, illegal immigrant facilitates understanding of the relationship between the pre–Civil War black struggle for freedom and the current struggle over the status of many Hispanic immigrants to this country.

Fugitive slaves were the illegal immigrants of their time, despite the fact that the U.S. did not restrict foreign immigration until 1875. Even though native-born Americans harbored widespread intense prejudice against the foreign born, immigrants from Europe came freely to American shores. Meanwhile Congress, through the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 and the harsher Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, acted against northward migration of enslaved black people from the South. Those apprehended under these laws could be forcibly returned south to their masters. This amounted to a system of anti-immigrant vigilance strikingly similar to the system in force today. The pre–Civil War system aimed to keep African Americans out of the North. The current system aims to keep unskilled workers, from Mexico, Central America, and Latin America generally, out of the U.S. Those caught illegally in the U.S. may be sent south to their homeland.

Today illegal Hispanic immigrants provide cheap agricultural, industrial, and domestic labor in the U.S. Before the Civil War, black migrants from the South provided cheap farm and domestic labor in the North. A desire for better working conditions, better pay, and increased freedom motivates today’s migrants from Latin America. Fugitive slaves had similar motives. And, just as employers today ignore or circumvent immigration laws, white northern employers disobeyed the Fugitive Slave Laws. Those who employed black illegals before the Civil War sought to save money.  Employers of Hispanic illegals today do as well.

Hispanic immigrants, and those who help them, clandestinely cross the U.S.-Mexican border and head north. Fugitive slaves, and those who helped them, developed similar skills to cross the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River. There are also parallels between safe-houses for Hispanic migrants today and Antebellum America’s underground railroad stations. But employers’ economic interests are key to understanding why Fugitive Slave Laws then and immigration laws now are difficult to enforce. Today employers shield illegal immigrants and lobby against restrictions on hiring them. Before the Civil War, black and white northern farmers and homeowners resisted an anti-immigration program that, as is the case today, relied on law enforcement agents. Prior to 1850 local justices of the peace and constables had jurisdiction. After that year U.S. Marshalls took over. Today state police and the U.S. Border Patrol have similar roles. In some cases today there is violence. Similarly on occasion before the Civil War, northerners who employed fugitive slaves confronted law enforcement agents or provided fugitive slaves with guns to defend themselves.

Just as today’s illegal immigrants have to be self-reliant, so did fugitive slaves. Just as illegal immigrants today face a variety of legal and societal forms of discrimination, fugitive slaves and their children did as well. Beyond receiving low pay for their work, they (like illegal immigrants today) faced deportation if discovered. As is the case today for illegal immigrants, fugitive slaves could not easily establish legal residency for themselves or admission to school for their children.

Yet there is a crucial difference between the political situation antebellum America’s “illegals” faced and what today’s immigrants face. Powerful pre–Civil War southerners demanded return of their fugitive slaves. This demand produced the Fugitive Slave Laws and enforcement of them. In contrast, today’s illegal immigrants flee unemployment and poverty rather than masters and slavery. No one in their home countries demands that the U.S. send them back. This difference suggests that today’s illegal immigrants will more easily achieve citizenship than did American slaves.

Stanley Harrold is professor of history at South Carolina State University and author of numerous books on the antislavery movement and the Civil War era, including Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War.

In his nonfiction novel Two Captains from Carolina: Moses Grandy, John Newland Maffitt, and the Coming of the Civil War, Bland Simpson twines together the lives of two accomplished nineteenth-century mariners from North Carolina—one African American, one Irish American. Though Moses Grandy (ca. 1791-ca. 1850) and John Newland Maffitt Jr. (1819-1886) never met, their stories bring to vivid life the saga of race and maritime culture in the antebellum and Civil War-era South. With his lyrical prose and inimitable voice, Bland Simpson offers readers a grand tale of the striving human spirit and the great divide that nearly sundered the nation.

In the following excerpt from Two Captains from Carolina (pp. 10-12), we get a glimpse of Moses Grandy’s early career as a boatman—the freedom he felt on the water and the opportunities that lay ahead.

###

The Wharf on the Pasquotank River
Elizabeth City, North Carolina
CIRCA 1813, WINTERTIME

Boatman dance, boatman sing
Boatman do most anything
When the boatman gets on shore
Spends his money and works for more.

Moses Grandy was used to going to bed cold and hungry in a cabin in Camden and then waking up no less cold, no less hungry, a hoecake scarcely enough to stave it off , turning out at first light, the ground frozen, he underclad and unshod, and the only way to warm his feet was to rouse a hog and stand in the absolute mud where the hog had lain all night and let that rare warm earth wake his flesh and move his own blood. Now he was Charles Grice’s boatman, and Mister Grice saw to it that the man he had to trust with no small part of his commercial life the fifty miles up to Norfolk and then back again did not go to work on the water hungry or cold or barefoot. The young man got a griddle cake, a salted herring, an old blanket refashioned into a coat with a rope belt to hold it closed, an old pair of boots, and a big cypress boat.

Grice put Grandy in command of a rude sailing barge, two huge dug-out cypress logs with a long plank keel joining them, here in North Carolina called a periauger, most of forty feet long overall and low with room aplenty for barrels of flour, barrels of fish, and decking enough that a hog or a goat or small cow could be happy just long enough to reach the market up the way. His was a heavy craft, with a pair of sails and a small cabin forward, yet without a name, and it could be pulled, poled, rowed, scull-oared, sailed, whatever motive force was necessary and available. Sometimes there might be a second such boat, sometimes two more. However many there were, Moses Grandy commanded them all.

Wintertime, wartime, he cared not—in a life and in a world of captivity he was at last master of something important: his own movements for many days at a time. Cold, what was that? Start early, start while it was still dark and the hard winter cold had its rough grip upon all these broad low tidelands, when the moon hung in the night clouds and the black river seemed frozen to its edges. This was still a cold he could live with somehow. Raise those two heavy Bermuda sails and catch the bare breath of wind and move slowly away to the north, in this cypress freightboat past the cypress sentinels lining the river’s edge, some faintly lit by the setting moon, some silhouetted, and Grandy and his crew, guarded by the very trees, moved upriver like free men.

In the clear, frigid morning, the sun poured a bright light without warmth over the black water. A tall blue heron stalked the shallows of the side woods as Grandy’s freightboat crawled northward toward Norfolk, the heron croaking hoarsely at him as he passed slowly and she took flight, following the serpentine Pasquotank upriver, the Moccasin Track scarcely navigable for a working craft but a free and easy range for a big silvergray-and-blue bird on the hunt.

As the morning advanced, a redtail hawk flew, planing the sky high above Moses Grandy, whose day was a hunt of his own.

Mister Grice’s goods got to get to Norfolk.
War or no war, I guide these boats.
I guide these boats.

——

I guide these boats up and down the old canal
Up and down the old canal, night and day
That’s my way.

Moses Grandy worked at this for months, for years, till he became Captain Grandy, widely known and addressed as such.

What a momentous thing it was to move freely in the world, to study wind and wave and make predictions and direct actions rather than bear the brunt of someone else’s, Grandy mused unceasingly. The length and breadth of the journeying to and from Norfolk, the power of the trust placed in him by Mister Grice in Elizabeth City and, on the upper end, by Mister Moses Myers, the merchant in Norfolk—these at moments seemed as liberating as liberation itself. With Grice his de facto employer, Captain Grandy now worked on shares, his pay directly related to the freight he safely brought down the waterways from Myers’s wharf on the river in Norfolk to Grice’s warehouse and shop in Elizabeth City.

Approaching the Norfolk wharves for the freight-gathering upper end of these trips, Grandy could always spy Myers with ease—long, lean-faced Myers with the short gray hair and the dark bushy eyebrows. Myers and his wife, Eliza, had been in Norfolk twenty-five years and were its first Jews, people said, and theirs was among the first brick homes laid up after the Revolution, a big one, a showplace with gilding on the living-room mantel, and with an octagon wing added on by none other than Benjamin Latrobe, the great architect who would also build the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Canal and much more. Moses Grandy heard—not from Myers himself but from other men around Hampton Roads, and not all at once—how Myers dealt with the French, ran the Bank of Richmond, and ran the council of Norfolk.

Good to have such friends, thought Grandy, men who trust you like the sun.

###

From Two Captains from Carolina: Moses Grandy, John Newland Maffitt, and the Coming of the Civil War, by Bland Simpson. Copyright © 2012 Bland Simpson.