Confederate Flag Removed in Palestine, Texas

The first national flag of the Confederacy is removed from the flagpole outside the Anderson County (Texas) Courthouse. (Photo by the Palestine, Texas, Herald Press)

CNHI News Service, by Tom Lindley on April 5 2011: PALESTINE, Texas — As a small crowd sang “Dixie,” the first national flag of the Confederacy was lowered from a flagpole outside a southeast Texas courthouse, ending a brewing controversy.

The Anderson County commissioners had voted, 3-2, to fly the flag during Confederate History and Heritage Month. But the flag, which also drew a group of protesters, flew for only a few days before representatives of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans lowered it.

Their action came minutes before the Palestine City Council voted unanimously to ask the commissioners to take it down.

Mayor Bob Herrington

Palestine Mayor Bob Herrington said he took an oath to defend the U.S. and Texas flags.

“It’s (the Confederacy) a government that no longer exists,” Herrington told the crowd. “...It’s hard for me to recognize a flag like the Confederate flag that is so divisive in nature.”

The issue had drawn attention from media outlets across the state to the community which is located southeast of Dallas.

Not all agreed to remove the flag. “Many members of the community, along with myself, are extremely disappointed that the Confederate flag was taken down from the courthouse this evening,” said Palestine resident Morgan Carroll, who added a protest response was being planned.

(source: By Tom Lindley at Apr 5 2011 - 10:39amDetails for this story were provided by the Palestine (Texas) Herald-Press.)

Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens

Fergus M. Bordewich writes: Seventy-five years old, with less than two years left to live, and in almost constant pain from a variety of ailments, Stevens focused his efforts on a new amendment to the Constitution, the Fourteenth, which would prohibit states from abridging equality before the law, and bar former Confederates from office and from voting in national elections until 1870. Although Stevens felt that the measure did not go far enough, it would totally change the states’ relationship to the federal government, by making it explicit that Americans were citizens of their nation first, and of their respective states second, and that states were therefore bound to abide by federal law. It was a truly revolutionary measure in the South where, in the pre-war effort to suppress criticism of slavery, states had passed laws limiting freedom of the press, the freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly, and even imposing censorship of the U.S. mail.

THE RADICALS WERE APPALLED when they realized that Lincoln’s successor, Tennessee-born Andrew Johnson, intended to allow the rebel states to speedily reenter the Union, without significant punishment of rebel leaders, or plans to protect the rights of newly-freed slaves. Their worst fears were confirmed when, in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866, the President permitted elected assemblies of former Confederates to enact new laws designed to reduce freedmen to semi-slavery, as anti-black rioting swept Southern cities, leaving hundreds of African-Americans dead. Stevens had himself carried in a chair onto the floor of the House, and in a voice so weak that his colleagues had to crowd around him to hear him, he pleaded with his colleagues to consider what was at stake in the South. “While the South has been bleeding at every pore, Congress has done nothing to protect the loyal people there, white or black, either in their persons, in their liberty, or in their property,” he whispered. Stevens got what he wanted, and federal troops returned to the South. It is said that the speech was one of the few ever delivered in Congress that resulted in the changing of votes on the spot. Stevens’s last battle was a losing one, however. He led the effort to impeach Johnson for firing the Radical members in his cabinet, a movement that failed—by a single vote—to oust the president from office.

Thaddeus Stevens

“Stevens was ahead of his time because he truly believed in racial equality,” Says Hans Trefousse, author of “Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian”. “Without Stevens, the effects of Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing suffrage to the freedmen, would have been impossible.” Although he would not live to see the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870, no one had worked harder or longer to make it a reality. Says Trefoussse, “In practice, those amendments were effectively nullified in the South, in the years after the end of Reconstruction. But they were still in the law. In the twentieth century, they would remind Americans of what they had once stood for: they were still there as the standard that the nation had set for itself.”

Thaddeus Stevens

The North won the Civil War, but lost the remembrance of it. By 1877, federal troops had been completely withdrawn from the South. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were systematically undone by a combination of harsh discriminatory laws and the terrorism of vigilante organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. The South, and indeed most of the nation, slumped into almost a century of entrenched racism and institutionalized segregation. In the memory of a country committed to reconciliation at the expense of the rights of African-Americans’ rights, there was little place for the furious idealism of an egalitarian like Stevens.

The nadir in Stevens’s reputation was reached with D.W. Griffith’s classic 1915 film “The Birth of A Nation,” a Civil War epic which heroized the Klan, and smeared blacks as clownish and lascivious monsters whose freedom endangered American democracy. (President Woodrow Wilson liked the film so much that he gave it a private showing at the White House.) Stevens was portrayed as a vengeful hypocrite, plotting with his diabolical black mistress to instigate a race war against helpless Southern whites. Someone who learned about Stevens only from the film might have supposed that he and Lydia Hamilton Smith were the source of all the nation’s racial problems. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, James Buchanan’s stock steadily rose, at least in Lancaster, and in the 1930's Wheatland was restored to its luxurious mid-nineteenth century splendor. When the Lancaster Historical Society published a guidebook to important sites in the city’s downtown, in 1962, Stevens’s home wasn’t even included on the map.

Law Office and Home of Thaddeus Stevens, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1868

AS SNOWFLAKES SWIRLED and danced over the streets of Lancaster, Jim Delle and I walked through the row house where Thaddeus Stevens lived, just a block from Penn Square where in times gone by crowds of supporters once roared to his surging oratory. The years have taken a heavy toll. The house’s modest Georgian facade has been covered over with ugly white modern bricks, and a garage door has been punched through the front of Stevens’s front parlor. Decrepit industrial carpeting, broken plaster, and scrawled graffiti cast a mournful pall through his one-time law office. Behind the house, Delle scraped the snow off the sheet of plywood that covered the broken crown of the cistern, and we climbed down into it on an aluminum ladder. In the dank brick compartment, Delle pointed out the small aperture through which fugitives had crawled from the tunnel that led to the tavern basement next door. The cistern was more than an exotic hiding place. It was physical proof of Stevens’s personal commitment not just to the abstract principle of emancipation, but in the most personal way possible to the men and women who suffered under slavery.

Wheatland - Home of James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States

Wheatland was built by William Jenkins, a lawyer, who built and named the Federal mansion in 1828. Buchanan purchased the property - three tracts totalling 22.45 acres (90,900 m2), including the mansion and several outbuildings, in December 1848 from William Morris Meredith, a Philadelphia lawyer.Buchanan resided here on occasion as President and after his term until his death

I kept thinking of the fiery, iron-willed, silver-tongued man who had made this refuge possible, at a time when harboring fugitive slaves was a federal crime. He had died thinking himself a failure. But he had paved the way for the civil rights advances of the twentieth century. In the 1950's and 1960's, the nation would have to learn again the lesson that Stevens tried to teach in the 1860's, that the rights of African-Americans could only be protected by the power, and occasionally the armed force, of the federal government. Had land been distributed to the ex-slaves as Stevens wished, the nation might well have been spared much of the shameful racial history that followed, and might instead have created a stable, economically and politically independent black middle class. After generations of neglect, however, his greatest work, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, still lay waiting for Americans to rediscover their meaning, and they became the foundation upon which was erected virtually all the civil rights legislation that reshaped the country since the 1960's.

Whether enough of Stevens’s home survives intact to become a museum dedicated to him and to the regional activities of the Underground Railroad, as local preservationists wish, is still an open question. Developers agreed after considerable local protest to leave about half of Stevens’s house standing, but they maintain that the rest must be leveled to make room for the new convention center. “We can’t just walk away from this house,” says Randy Harris, the former director of the Lancaster Preservation Trust, who has fought to prevent the demolition of the house and the adjoining properties that belonged to Stevens. “Stevens is way too important a figure in our history to abandon once again.” —Fergus M. Bordewich

(source: "Thaddeus Stevens and James Buchanan: How their Historic Rivalry Shaped America," by Fergus M. Bordewich. This article originally appeared as “Was James Buchanan Our Worst President? Digging into a Historic Rivalry” in Smithsonian Magazine, February 2004.)

Mightier Than The Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America

Mightier Than The Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America

By David S. Reynolds; Illustrated. 351 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

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From the New York Times Book Review on June 24, 2011, "The Impact of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’" reviewed by Andrew Delbanco:



No less an authority than Leo Tolstoy included “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on his short list of “examples of the highest art flowing from love of God and man.” Fifty years later, James Baldwin called the same book a “very bad novel” full of “excessive and spurious emotion.” What goes on here? The question belongs in the present tense because it is by no means settled.



There’s nothing unsettled, however, about “Mightier Than the Sword,” David S. Reynolds’s informative account of the writing, reception and modern reputation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Reynolds unstintingly celebrates its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as a colossal writer who mobilized public opinion against slavery, and proved, against long odds, “a white woman’s capacity to enter into the subjectivity of black people.”



The novel began to germinate in Stowe’s mind while she was living in Cincinnati in the 1830s and ’40s, where she met fugitive slaves who had escaped through or from Kentucky, and where, as Reynolds puts it, “she loved spending time in the kitchen with servants like the African-American Zillah.” In the spring of 1850, having moved to Maine, where she followed the Congressional debates over a proposed new law that would deny fugitive slaves basic rights while imposing new penalties on anyone harboring them, she wrote to a magazine editor that “the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.” The result was a series of fictional sketches of slaves under physical or psychological assault — among them, the beautiful Eliza, who escapes from bounty hunters by leaping from ice floe to ice floe across the Ohio River with her baby in her arms; the brooding Cassy, who belongs to the brutal Simon Legree; and Tom himself, whose gentleness and generosity grow apace as he is sold farther and farther south, eventually to Legree, who torments and tortures him before ordering his overseers to beat him to death.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

When the magazine pieces were gathered and published in 1852 as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Or, Life Among the Lowly,” the first print run was 5,000. Within a year, the book had sold 300,000 copies in America, and over a million in Britain. As Reynolds points out, a contemporary periodical noted that the number of people who encountered the story may have been 10 times the number who bought the book — since it came out in an era when reading aloud was a common practice among family and friends.



If ever there was a publishing event to prove the principle that timing is everything, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was it. On both sides of the sectional divide the timber was dry — and Stowe struck the igniting spark. In the North, Frederick Douglass rejoiced that she had “baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.” In the South, her indictment of slavery through the odious figure of Legree was likened to a “malignant” attack on the institution of marriage, as if she had chosen a wife-beater to represent “the normal condition of the relation” between loving spouses.



A decade after the book appeared, Abraham Lincoln is said to have received Stowe at the White House with the greeting, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?” No one knows if Lincoln really said that, and as the historian David Potter once put it, “history cannot evaluate with precision the influence of a novel upon public opinion.” But Reynolds is sure that the influence of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was immense.



Not only, he says, had Stowe “paved the way” for Lincoln’s election, but after her death she may have helped Lenin, who admired her novel, evade the czar’s agents by escaping from Finland over “the breaking ice of the moderately frozen Orfjarden Sound.” Through stage versions of the novel, she helped Henry James develop a sense of “human feelings as performative and theatrical.” Through Chinese and Portuguese translations, she inspired anticolonialism in China and emancipation in Brazil, and she taught the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson how “great masses of people can be influenced through their emotions.”



Reynolds is a rewarding researcher. He illuminates the innumerable “Tom shows” that became a staple of American popular entertainment, as well as the use of Uncle Tom’s image to sell jigsaw puzzles, dolls, card games, stockings and — grotesquely enough — licorice. He identifies stage and screen stars who accepted (Betty Grable, Judy Garland) or refused (Lena Horne, Paul Robeson) roles based on Stowe’s characters. One film performance is surely still worth watching: Little Eva — the angelic white girl who dies after befriending Tom — as played by Lou Costello.

Reynolds has insightful things to say about Stowe’s efforts “to present Southerners as favorably as possible” even as she excoriated their peculiar institution. And in surveying Uncle Tom’s postpublication career, he makes a number of striking points. He suggests, for example, that it may have been Frederick Douglass who first used the term “Uncle Tom” as a pejorative epithet denoting the shuffling docility of a submissive black man, and he traces the ups and downs of the novel’s reputation — high in the Civil War years, low during much of the 20th century, when the romanticized account in Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” (1936) largely supplanted Stowe’s version of the antebellum South. Today, Reynolds says, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is again “one of the must-reads of American literature.”

s such, it is a challenging book with which to come to terms. In my experience, students can be embarrassed by it. They recognize it as a valuable document for understanding the history of what we now call the “conversation” about race in America. In response to the prevailing view of black people as inferior beings (a view long held in the North as well as the South), it lifted its black characters to the status of impossibly virtuous victims — just the elevation that James Baldwin felt was a kind of contempt. When Baldwin called Stowe less a novelist than an “impassioned pamphleteer,” he meant, in part, that her characters don’t seem capable of selfishness as well as self-sacrifice, or of pettiness and jealousy along with piety and wisdom. In short, they don’t seem human. Reynolds calls Baldwin’s a “blinkered critique,” though he concedes that Stowe trafficked in the clichés of “romantic racialism” while reminding us, fairly enough, that what now seems “like racial stereotyping” was “progressive” in her day.

Still, we are left at the end of this book with the unsettling question of how to think about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as part of our cultural inheritance. The case for it as a literary work of depth and nuance is dubious. Yet it belongs to the very short list of American books (including, say, “The Other America” by Michael Harrington and “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson) that helped create or consolidate a reform movement — in Stowe’s case, the most consequential reform movement in our history. Perhaps the fact that readers today have trouble taking seriously its heroes and villains is a tribute to its achievement — since, in some immeasurable way, it helped bring on the war that rendered unimaginable the world that Stowe attempted to imagine.

City Talk: David Reynolds, author "Mightier than the Sword"

Civil War Era Patriotic Songs and Hymns

Civil War Songs; Dixie; The Battle Hymn of the Republic

In the meanwhile general consent was being given to a song and to a hymn which are more and more popular with the lapse of time. These are Dixie and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The original Dixie was composed on forty-eight hours’s notice by Dan D. Emmett in September, 1859.

He was then under contract with Bryant’s Minstrels, New York, as musician and composer of “negro melodies and plantation walk-arounds.” On a bleak northern Sunday he composed this “rush order” around the showman’s autumnal and winter saying, “I wish I was in Dixie.”

The rollicking measure scored a natural success with every audience, and the sentiment reinforced its appeal in the South. Sung late in 1860 and early in 1861 at New Orleans, it made an especially sensational “hit” and soon all the Confederate states rang with it. 1 On 30 April of that year The Natchez Courier printed Albert B. Pike’s “Southrons, hear your country call you,” a stirring lyric itself, but only a temporary substitute for the Emmett words, “I wish I was in de land ob cotton,” the first stanza of which is known everywhere in America.

Fanny J. Crosby’s attempt to regain the tune for the North with her “On ye patriots to the battle” was wholly unsuccessful; the other Southern variants died away; Pike’ss version is now a literary memory; but Emmett’s original words and music still bring people to their feet as no other song in America does. They stand in deference to the tradition of The Star Spangled Banner, but they rise to Dixie itself.

The melody for The Battle Hymn of the Republic has had quite the most varied career in the history of American patriotic song. It came into being as a Southern camp-meeting song early enough to have been included in Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Collection of 1852. With the organization of the 12th Massachusetts Infantry in 1861 two Maine men in the second battalion introduced to camp “Say brothers, will you meet us, On Canaan’s happy shore?”

To this melody the glee club of the unit evolved a set of verses half applied to one of their own members, a Scotch John Brown. When these words became the characteristic song of the regiment, the officers tried in vain to have the words applied to Ellsworth, the first Northern commissioned officer who had fallen in the War.

Inevitably many new versions were composed on John Brown of Ossawatomie—by H. H. Brownell, Edna Dean Proctor, Charles Sprague Hall, and anonymous writers; and from these developed variants beyond recall. The hymn had become a war ballad of widest popularity; but the ballad was to be rehabilitated as a hymn again. This occurred when Julia Ward Howe, one of a party to visit the Army of the Potomac in December, 1861, was urged by James Freeman Clarke to dignify the chant with adequate words. Her attempt was christened by James T. Fields and appeared in the Atlantic, February, 1862, as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The marked differences between these three lyrics show how vital is the relation between words and music.

The colourless, seven-syllabled, thrice-repeated line, “Say brothers, will you meet us,” is plaintive, if not dreary, in effect. The eleven syllables of “John Brown’ss body lies a-mouldering in the grave,” with their stronger vocal quality and their sinister suggestiveness, have a primitive folk-quality and a martial vigour. The iambic heptameters of “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” rise to the elevation of a religious processional.

Elvis - Civil War Songs; Dixie; The Battle Hymn of the Republic

Abraham Lincoln and the Freed Slaves

Original Thomas Nast Drawing of Freed Slaves Greeting Abraham Lincoln in Richmond, Virginia

On April 4, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln entered the city of Richmond Virginia, the capitol of the Confederate States of America. This was one day after the fall of Richmond to the Union army. This, one of the most historic events of Lincoln's presidency, was captured by renowned artist Thomas Nast in this now famous sketch. This messianic scene showing Lincoln being praised and almost worshipped by freed slaves and liberated Southerners. The famous Nast sketch was published in Harper's Weekly shortly thereafter and this is an original Harper's Weekly leaf of the Nast sketch. This leaf is 137 years old.

In presenting this illustration, Harper's Weekly correctly predicted the enduring legacy of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. Harper's succinctly stated that "Posterity will see in him a greater man than his contemporaries can acknowledge" and "Among all the incidents of Lincoln's life, none will be more fondly prized and remembered than that which Thomas Nast Captured in this Illustration."

The Assassination of President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre on the Night of April 14, 1865.

A short ten days after this historic event, President Lincoln lay dying, a victim of the assassin John Wilkes Booth.

April 4, 1865 started early for Mr. Lincoln. He began the day with quiet resolve to personally walk the streets of the fallen rebel capitol. He left Washington on the Ship the "River Queen", and stayed with the ship as far as Varina. He disembarked the River Queen, and was taken by Army Ambulance to the outskirts of Richmond Virginia, where he met Union Admiral Porter. At about 11:00, Mr. Lincoln entered the city of Richmond on foot, accompanied by Admiral Porter, Captain Bell, and a protective force of about a half dozen marines. Crowds thronged the streets, and chief and eager among them were the emancipated, wishing to pay homage, and give thanks to their Great Emancipator.

The small white boy clutching the President's hand . . . that is Tad Lincoln, the President's son, whom the President had taken with him to the fallen Rebel capital. This day, April 4, 1865 was Tad Lincoln's 12th Birthday. As Mr. Lincoln and his son walked the streets of Richmond, one group of Newly freed slaves cried "Glory, Hallelujah!" and fell to their knees before Mr. Lincoln. The President motioned for them to rise. "Don't kneel to me." he told them. "You must kneel to God only and thank Him for your freedom." "Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to others, and it is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years."

We often think of the last years of Lincoln's life as filled with the heartache and pain of his heroic efforts to preserve the union and free the slaves. This illustration is an encouraging reminder that Lincoln did, in fact, have a brief glimpse before his death of his enduring legacy, a United Nation, with Freedom and Justice for all.

(source: Son of the South)

Memorial Day: Forgetting Why We Remember

Dr. David Blight wrote an article, "Forgetting Why We Remember," in the New York Times on May 29, 2011. He states: MOST Americans know that Memorial Day is about honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a holiday devoted to department store sales, half-marathons, picnics, baseball and auto racing. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

At the end of the Civil War, Americans faced a formidable challenge: how to memorialize 625,000 dead soldiers, Northern and Southern. As Walt Whitman mused, it was “the dead, the dead, the dead — our dead — or South or North, ours all” that preoccupied the country. After all, if the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, four million names would be on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, instead of 58,000.

Officially, in the North, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans’ organization, called on communities to conduct grave-decorating ceremonies. On May 30, funereal events attracted thousands of people at hundreds of cemeteries in countless towns, cities and mere crossroads. By the 1870s, one could not live in an American town, North or South, and be unaware of the spring ritual.

But the practice of decorating graves — which gave rise to an alternative name, Decoration Day — didn’t start with the 1868 events, nor was it an exclusively Northern practice. In 1866 the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Columbus, Ga., chose April 26, the anniversary of Gen. Joseph Johnston’s final surrender to Gen. William T. Sherman, to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers. Later, both May 10, the anniversary of Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s death, and June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis, were designated Confederate Memorial Day in different states.

Soldier's Graves, Alexandria, Virginia

Memorial Days were initially occasions of sacred bereavement, and from the war’s end to the early 20th century they helped forge national reconciliation around soldierly sacrifice, regardless of cause. In North and South, orators and participants frequently called Memorial Day an “American All Saints Day,” likening it to the European Catholic tradition of whole towns marching to churchyards to honor dead loved ones.

But the ritual quickly became the tool of partisan memory as well, at least through the violent Reconstruction years. In the South, Memorial Day was a means of confronting the Confederacy’s defeat but without repudiating its cause. Some Southern orators stressed Christian notions of noble sacrifice. Others, however, used the ritual for Confederate vindication and renewed assertions of white supremacy. Blacks had a place in this Confederate narrative, but only as time-warped loyal slaves who were supposed to remain frozen in the past.

The Lost Cause tradition thrived in Confederate Memorial Day rhetoric; the Southern dead were honored as the true “patriots,” defenders of their homeland, sovereign rights, a natural racial order and a “cause” that had been overwhelmed by “numbers and resources” but never defeated on battlefields.

Yankee Memorial Day orations often righteously claimed the high ground of blood sacrifice to save the Union and destroy slavery. It was not uncommon for a speaker to honor the fallen of both sides, but still lay the war guilt on the “rebel dead.” Many a lonely widow or mother at these observances painfully endured expressions of joyous death on the altars of national survival.

Some events even stressed the Union dead as the source of a new egalitarian America, and a civic rather than a racial or ethnic definition of citizenship. In Wilmington, Del., in 1869, Memorial Day included a procession of Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians and Catholics; white Grand Army of the Republic posts in parade with a black post; and the “Mount Vernon Cornet Band (colored)” keeping step with the “Irish Nationalists with the harp and the sunburst flag of Erin.”

Post-Civil War Ruins of Charleston, South Carolina

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.

The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

The grandstand on the north side of the course was erected in 1836. This 1857 view of the grandstand was published in John Beaufain Irving's The South Carolina Jockey Club ()

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The Ladies' Clubhouse on the north side of the course was erected in 1836. During the late months of the Civil War, Federal officers held captive by the Confederates were confined here. ()

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

1865 view of the Union soldiers graves at Washington Racecourse ()

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.

Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished.

Map of the Washington Race Course, 1864

Indeed, 51 years later, the president of the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry from a United Daughters of the Confederacy official in New Orleans asking if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite in 1865; the story had apparently migrated westward in community memory. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith, leader of the association, responded tersely, “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.”

Beckwith may or may not have known about the 1865 event; her own “official” story had become quite different and had no place for the former slaves’ march on their masters’ racecourse. In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream recognition.

AS we mark the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, we might reflect on Frederick Douglass’s words in an 1878 Memorial Day speech in New York City, in which he unwittingly gave voice to the forgotten Charleston marchers.

He said the war was not a struggle of mere “sectional character,” but a “war of ideas, a battle of principles.” It was “a war between the old and the new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization ... and in dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield.” With or against Douglass, we still debate the “something” that the Civil War dead represent.

Charleston, South Carolina Historic Marker for the First Memorial Day

The old racetrack is gone, but an oval roadway survives on the site in Hampton Park, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The old gravesite of the Martyrs of the Race Course is gone too; they were reinterred in the 1880s at a national cemetery in Beaufort, S.C.

But the event is no longer forgotten. Last year I had the great honor of helping a coalition of Charlestonians, including the mayor, Joseph P. Riley, dedicate a marker to this first Memorial Day by a reflecting pool in Hampton Park.

By their labor, their words, their songs and their solemn parade on their former owners’ racecourse, black Charlestonians created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution. (source: New York Times)

***

David W. Blight, a professor of history and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale, is the author of the forthcoming “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.”

Testimony from Victims of New York’s Draft Riots, July, 1863

“If It Were Not For My Trust in Christ I Do Not Know How I Could Have Endured It”: Testimony from Victims of New York’s Draft Riots, July, 1863

Between July 13 and 16, 1863, the largest riots the United States had yet seen shook New York City. In the so-called Civil War draft riots, the city’s poor white working people, many of them Irish immigrants, bloodily protested the federally-imposed draft requiring all men to enlist in the Union Army. The rioters took out their rage on their perceived enemies: the Republicans whose wealth allowed them to purchase substitutes for military service, and the poor African Americans—their rivals in the city’s labor market—for whom the war was being fought. On July 20, four days after federal troops put down the uprising, a group of Wall Street businessmen formed a committee to aid New York’s devastated black community. The Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots gathered and distributed funds, and collected the following testimony.

Abraham Franklin

This young man who was murdered by the mob on the corner of Twenty-seventh St., and Seventh avenue, was a quiet, inoffensive man, 23 years of age, of unexceptionable character, and a member of the Zion African Church in this city. Although a cripple, he earned a living for himself and his mother by serving a gentleman in the capacity of a coachman. A short time previous to the assault upon his person he called upon his mother to see if anything could be done by him for her safety. The old lady, who is noted for her piety and her Christian deportment, said she considered herself perfectly safe; but if her time to die had come, she was ready to die. Her son then knelt down by her side, and implored the protection of Heaven in behalf of his mother. The old lady was affected to tears, and said to our informant that it seemed to her that good angels were present in the room.

Scarcely had the supplicant risen from his knees, when the mob broke down the door, seized him, beat him over the head and face with fists and clubs, and then hanged him in the presence of his mother.

While they were engaged, the military came and drove them away, cutting down the body of Franklin who raised his arm once slightly and gave a few signs of life.

The military then moved on to quell other riots, when the mob returned and again suspended the now probably lifeless body of Franklin, cutting out pieces of flesh and otherwise mutilating it.

Peter Heuston.

Peter Heuston, sixty-three years of age, a Mohawk Indian, with dark complexion and straight black hair, who has for several years been a resident of this city, at the corner of Rosevelt and Oak streets, and who has obtained a livelihood as a laborer, proved a victim to the late riots.

His wife died about three weeks before the riots, leaving with her husband an only child, a little girl named Lavinia, aged eight years, whom the Merchants' Committee have undertaken to adopt with a view of affording her a guardianship and an education. Heuston served with the New York Volunteers in the Mexican War, and has always been loyal to our government. He was brutally attacked on the 13th of July by a gang of ruffians who evidently thought him to be of the African race because of his dark complexion. He died within four days at Bellevue hospital from his injuries....

Wm. Henry Nichols

Died July 16th, from injuries received at the hands of the rioters on the 15th of July.

Mrs. Statts, his mother, tells this story:—

The father of Wm. Henry died some years ago, and the boy has since, by good behavior, with persevering industry, earned his own living; he was a communicant of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in good standing. I had arrived from Philadelphia, the previous Monday evening, before any indications of the riot were known, and was temporarily stopping, on Wednesday, July 15th, at the house of my son, No.147 East 28th street.

At 3 o’clock of that day the mob arrived and immediately commenced an attack with terrific yells, and a shower of stones and bricks, upon the house. In the next room to where I was sitting was a poor woman, who had been confined with a child on Sunday, three days previous. Some of the rioters broke through the front door with pick axes, and came rushing into the room where this poor woman lay, and commenced to pull the clothes from off her. Knowing that their rate was chiefly directed against men, I hid my son behind me and ran with him through the back door, down into the basement. In a little while I saw the innocent babe, of three days old, come crashing down into the yard; some of the rioters had dashed it out of the back window, killing it instantly. In a few minutes streams of water came pouring down into the basement, the mob had cut the Croton water-pipes with their axes. Fearing we should be drowned in the cellar, (there were ten of us, mostly women and children, there) I took my boy and flew past the dead body of the babe, out to the rear of the yard, hoping to escape with him through an open lot into 29th street; but here, to our horror and dismay, we met the mob again; I, with my son, had climbed the fence, but the sight of those maddened demons so affected me that I fell back, fainting, into the yard; my son jumped down from the fence to pick me up, and a dozen of the rioters came leaping over the fence after him. As they surrounded us my son exclaimed, “save my mother, gentlemen, if you kill me.” "Well, we will kill you," they answered; and with that two ruffians seized him, each taking hold of an arm, while a third, armed with a crow-bar, calling upon them to stand and hold his arms apart, deliberately struck him a heavy blow over the head, felling him, like a bullock, to the ground. (He died in the N.Y. hospital two days after.) I believe if I were to live a hundred years I would never forget that scene, or cease to hear the horrid voices of that demoniacal mob resounding in my ears.

They then drove me over the fence, and as I was passing over, one of the mob seized a pocket-book, which he saw in my bosom, and in his eagerness to get it tore the dress off my shoulders.

I, with several others, then ran to the 29th street Station House, but we were here refused admittance, and told by the Captain that we were frightened without cause. A gentleman who accompanied us told the Captain of the facts, but we were all turned away.

I then went down to my husband’s, in Broome Street, and there I encountered another mob, who, before I could escape commenced stoning me. They beat me severely.

I reached the house but found my husband had left for Rahway. Scarcely knowing what I did, I then wandered, bewildered and sick, in the direction he had taken, and towards Philadelphia, and reached Jersey City, where a kind, Christian gentleman, Mr. Arthur Lynch, found me, and took me to his house, where his good wife nursed me for over two weeks, while I was very sick.

I am a member of the Baptist Church, and if it were not for my trust in Christ I do not know how I could have endured it.

Interesting Statement

I am a whitewasher by trade, and have worked, boy and man, in this city for sixty-three years. On Tuesday afternoon I was standing on the corner of Thirtieth street and Second avenue, when a crowd of young men came running along shouting “Here’s a nigger, here’s a nigger.” Almost before I knew of their intention, I was knocked down, kicked here and there, badgered and battered without mercy, until a cry of “the Peelers are coming” was raised; and I was left almost senseless, with a broken arm and a face covered with blood, on the railroad track. I was helped home on a cart by the officers, who were very kind to me, and gave me some brandy before I got home. I entertain no malice and have no desire for revenge against these people. Why should they hurt me or my colored brethren? We are poor men like them; we work hard and get but little for it. I was born in this State and have lived here all my life, and it seems hard, very hard, that we should be knocked down and kept out of work just to oblige folks who won’t work themselves and don’t want others to work.

We asked him if it was true that the negroes had formed any organization for self-defence, as was rumored. He said no; that, so far as he knew, “they all desire to keep out of the way, to be quiet, and do their best toward allaying the excitement in the City.”

The room in which the old man was lying was small, but it was the kitchen, sitting-room, bedroom and garret of four grown persons and five children.

Instances of this kind might be multiplied by the dozen, gathered from the lips of suffering men, who, though wounded and maimed by ruffians and rioters, are content to be left alone, and wish for no revenge.

Burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum

Our attention was early called to this outrage by a number of letters from the relatives and friends of the children, anxiously inquiring as to the whereabouts of the little ones. It is well known that as soon as the Bull’s Head Hotel had been attacked by the mob, their next destination was the Colored Orphan Asylum, on Fifth Avenue, near Forty-third street. The crowd had swelled to an immense number at this locality, and went professionally to work in order to destroy the building, and, at the same time, to make appropriation of any thing of value by which they might aggrandize themselves. About four hundred entered the house at the time, and immediately proceeded to pitch out beds, chairs, tables, and every species of furniture, which were eagerly seized by the crowd below, and carried off. When all was taken, the house was then set on fire, and shared the fate of the others.

While the rioters were clamoring for admittance at the front door, the Matron and Superintendent were quietly and rapidly conducting the children out the back yard, down to the police station. They remained there until Thursday, (the burning of the Asylum occurred on Monday, July 13th, when they were all removed in safety to Blackwell’s Island, where they still remain.

There were 230 children between the ages of 4 and 12 years in the home at the time of the riot.

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The buildings were of brick and were substantial and commodious structures. A number of fine shade trees and flowering shrubs adorned the ample play grounds and front court yard, and a well built fence surrounded the whole.

The main buildings were burned. The trees were girdled by cutting with axes; the shrubs uprooted, and the fence carried away. All was destroyed except the residence of Mr. Davis [the superintendent], which was sacked.

White Women

Some four or five white women, wives of colored men applied for relief. In every instance they had been severly dealt with by the mob. One Irish woman, Mrs. C. was so persecuted and shunned by every one, that when she called for aid, she was nearly insane.

[Source: Report of the Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People, Suffering From the Late Riots in the City of New York. (New York, 1863).]