McMinn Fellowship

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  This may not be war, but rather Statesmanship’: Sherman’s March through Griswoldville, Milledgeville, and Greater Savannah (2024-2025)

  Matthew Lempke

  PhD candidate Matthew Lempke holds the McMinn Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year. He is currently at work on a dissertation entitled “‘This may not be war, but rather Statesmanship’: Sherman’s March through Griswoldville, Milledgeville, and Greater Savannah.” First inspired by traveling through numerous towns in Georgia that Sherman did not destroy and by the general’s own animated rhetoric, Mr. Lempke’s research stands at the crossroads of current and emerging fields of scholarly interest. His writing emphasizes the centrality of Griswoldville and Milledgeville, as events in both communities set the trajectory for the entirety of the campaign.

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  States' Rights Reexamined: The Nullification Crisis, Indian Removal, and the South's Prevailing Political Ideology Leading to the Civil War (2023-2024)

  Joel Sturgeon

  PhD candidate Joel Sturgeon holds the McMinn Fellowship for the 2023-24 academic year. He is currently at work on a dissertation entitled "States' Rights Reexamined: The Nullification Crisis, Indian Removal, and the South's Prevailing Political Ideology Leading to the Civil War."

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  Slavery, Antislavery, and Masculinity in Kansas and Kentucky (2022-2023)

  Spencer King

  Spencer King received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Emporia State University in 2014 and 2016. Spencer is interested in the history of race, gender, and antislavery efforts in nineteenth century America, especially in the nineteenth century West. His dissertation focuses on the development of abolitionist masculinity in Kansas Territory in the 1850s and how this influenced Kansans' ideas of what masculinity should look like amongst soldiers after the start of the Civil War. He specifically looks at the ways in which political violence between the Free Staters and Border Ruffians shaped views of masculinity amongst antislavery Kansans and how the Free State forces modeled ideas of masculinity that carried into the Civil War, such as the importance of enlistment, what acting honorably in battle entailed, and how attacks on civilian populations could complicate ideas of gender roles. In studying Bleeding Kansas and Kansas during the Civil War, Spencer aims to explain how antislavery Kansans perceived themselves instead of looking at how the rest of the U.S. viewed them, and he also wants to show how women and Black soldiers acted in the challenging circumstances they faced in Kansas.

  Gender roles and conceptions of gender have varied cultures throughout the world and have transformed over time. Times of significant change, such as times of intense conflict and warfare, have often aided these transformations in gender as people adapted to their circumstances. The opening of Kansas Territory and the eventual start of the Civil War mark one of these moments, as white abolitionists moved from the eastern United States to the West in order to prevent the spread of slavery and encountered violence from proslavery actors who sought to preserve the institution. Bleeding Kansas, the violent conflict between proslavery and antislavery activists in Kansas Territory, eventually gave way to the Civil War, where white abolitionists continued to embrace violent expressions of masculinity as they enlisted in the Union army. The Civil War also marked an opportunity for Black men, both free and enslaved, to legally assert identities as citizens and men because of the pathways enlistment created for them later in the war. This potential reward came with significant risk, though, as Confederate soldiers refused to see Black soldiers as anything other than escaped enslaved men and would not respect their surrenders on the battlefield, either executing them or selling them back into slavery. Furthermore, there were groups of people not eager to embrace change, such as white Kentuckians, whose ideas of masculinity were inseparable from maintaining the institution of slavery and white supremacy. While some white abolitionist and Black men used enlistment to embrace new ideas of masculinity, white Kentuckians used the environment of warfare to protect what was familiar.

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  The Crisis of White Supremacy in the Antebellum South: Poor Whites, Slavery, and the Coming of the Civil War (2021-2022)

  Jeffrey Glossner

  Jeffrey Glossner received his bachelor's degree in history from Penn State and his masters in history from the University of Mississippi. Jeffrey is generally interested in the intersection of race and class in the antebellum South and the ways in which sectionalism affected elite southern understandings of their society. His dissertation, titled The Crisis of White Supremacy in the Antebellum South: Poor Whites, Slavery, and the Coming of the Civil War, explores the role that the presence of a large class of poor landless white people in the South had in the development of southern intellectual, social, and political culture. In particular, he is interested in the problem that poor whites presented to elite southerners who were trying to establish a slave society based in the political ideal of white supremacy; finding that elite southerners wrote poor whites out of mainstream definitions of both southerness and whiteness and struggled to square their class problem with their race problem, creating a crisis of white supremacy as they tried to defend slavery during the sectional crisis which precipitated the American Civil War.

  The so-called “poor whites” of the antebellum South have often been overlooked by historians due to their perceived insignificance to the political and cultural development of the South. However, within the context of the sectional debate over slavery, poor whites represented a disturbing presence for elite southerners who sought to defend slavery on the basis of white supremacy, a political platform built on the promise of universal white superiority. In order to defend the slave labor system from northern promises of white supremacy under free labor and to justify widespread southern white poverty, the architects of the antebellum southern cultural ideal marginalized poor whites and depicted them as inferior creatures who did not deserve the privileges of southern white supremacy. This dissertation argues that this discourse about poor whites played a significant role in the development of southern social and political culture, and stood at the nexus of central issues that contributed to crises that led to the Civil War. Proslavery elites feared poor whites due to their frequent interactions with enslaved black laborers that exacerbated southern fears of violent insurrection. The presence of poor whites caused tension with efforts to modernize slavery and adapt it to modern industries. And, most importantly, they appeared to be potential political allies to antislavery northerners. The problem that poor whites posed to efforts to adapt slavery to the modern world resulted in the further radicalization of proslavery ideology and the emergence of anti-democratic ideas within the politics of slavery. These provided increased impetus for the southern slave owning elite to seek secession from the United States in order to protect the institution of slavery.

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  Remembering the Civil War in Indian Territory: Conflict, Commemoration, and the Birth of a State, 1861-1965 (2021-2022)

  Sarah Elliott

  A native of San Angelo, Texas, Sarah Elliott received her bachelor’s degree in history from Angelo State University in 2013. She completed her master’s degree in history at the University of Mississippi in 2016 and she continued into the doctoral program later that year. Elliott is currently a doctoral candidate and her research interests include the Civil War and Reconstruction, memory, and Indigenous history. Her dissertation examines the memory of the Civil War in Indian Territory and Oklahoma from roughly 1861 to 1965, and through this project she aims to address two major deficiencies in the historiography of the Civil War. First, she discusses the role of Indigenous Americans in the war within Indian Territory and their memories of the conflict. Second, she examines the influx of non-Indigenous peoples to Indian Territory in the late nineteenth century and how these conflicting interpretations of the war resulted in an embattled regional identity for this former border territory.

  This project argues that the Civil War was the mechanism by which Indian Territory transformed into the white-dominated U.S. state of Oklahoma, both in population and identity. Factions of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole Nations (known as the Five Tribes) in Indian Territory allied with the Confederacy at the outset of the war, and in the Reconstruction era, the federal government used these alliances to justify harsh treaty terms that threatened tribal sovereignty and dispossessed these nations of much of their land. Initially, the federal government used this confiscated land for the resettlement of other forcibly removed Indigenous peoples. By the late nineteenth century, however, the Dawes Allotment Act and the subsequent land runs allowed for a rapid influx of white settlers who brought their own memories of the Civil War and its repercussions to Indian Territory, memories which did not include the Indigenous experience. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, Civil War memorial organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic and the United Daughters of the Confederacy ensured that these transplanted memories rewrote the narrative of Oklahoma history by whitewashing the Indigenous experience to suit that of white Oklahomans. The Confederate memory of the war in particular co-opted the image of the Confederate Native American to validate its cause, and by the time of Oklahoma statehood in 1907, this whitewashed representation of Indigenous Oklahomans became a central element of the state's identity. The Civil War Centennial in the 1960s further emphasized Oklahoma's transplanted Confederate ii identity and, along with the Semi-Centennial of Oklahoma statehood in 1957, cast Native Americans as a "vanishing race" by portraying Indigenous Oklahomans as representatives of the state's past. By the mid-twentieth century, then, what was once Indian Territory had transformed into the pseudo-Confederate state of Oklahoma and all but wrote the Five Tribes' experiences out of the historical narrative of how the state came to exist. The "Sooner State" was born out of the dispossession of Indigenous land as a direct result of the Civil War, and its identity was built upon the notion that Indigenous Oklahomans represent the state's past rather than exist in its present.

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  Beyond the Lines: A Reassessment of Civil War Prisons (2019-2020)

  Beth Kruse

  Beth Kruse is a native of Mt. Olive, Illinois, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi. She holds a Master’s Degree in History from the University of Illinois, Springfield and a Bachelor’s of Education Degree in Workforce Planning and Development from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Kruse spent part of her professional career helping to research and develop innovative workforce development solutions for Central Illinois employers and workers with the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Her research interests include race, gender, and memory studies. She has presented her work on Civil War prisoner narratives at various conferences and symposia, and her research has earned her the Chapin Research Award from UIS and a Ventress Summer Graduate Fellowship from the University of Mississippi. A dedicated public historian, she has served as a volunteer Civil War Flag Conservationist for the Illinois State Military Museum, a Volunteer Interpreter at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, and a docent for the annual Behind the Big House Project with Preserve Marshall County and Holly Springs in Mississippi. Her digital humanities projects include creating the website “Mother Jones and Coal Mining Memory” and co-creating the website “Captured and Confined: Enemy Combatants and Illinois Military Prisons, 1861-1865.” She currently serves as the Assistant Principal Investigator on the Ida B. Wells Commemorative Tour, a racial reconciliation heritage tourism project funded by a Constellation Grant from the University of Mississippi.

  “Beyond the Lines”: A Reassessment of Civil War Prisons, challenges the historical interpretations of Civil War military prisons. Specifically, it analyses the political, social, and economic conditions of these systems by not only adding omitted gender, class, and race scholarship but flushing out the power dynamics between these group and military administrations. The re-examination of primary source material by reading against the grain to find overlooked insights reveals these sources not only provide a wealth of information about omitted groups, but that they have been misinterpreted. Additionally, applying the concepts of historical memory establishes how the Lost Cause shaped not only the scholarly prison interpretations but how the historical actors involved with the prisoners influenced the building of a national myth. The results were uncovering that the number of Union black prisoners was far greater than most realize and that they fought for their freedom by writing letters couched in the rhetoric of citizenship rights. On top of that, these captured black soldiers were impressed by the Confederate military for their labor, which was a stage in the transition from chattel slavery to involuntary servitude. Furthermore, it showed that southern-sympathizing women living in the north were active in the war by not only contributing to the mental and physical well-being of Confederate prisoners but that they engaged in treasonous acts. This dissertation contends these women were vital components in the Union prisoner of war supply line thus, challenging the narrative that the Union supply line was a model of efficiency. This dissertation concludes that the current division found in America is tied to the misinterpretations of military prison studies and that past and present scholarly arguments tend to reinforce the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War. While many Civil War military prison scholars argue about atrocities and mortality rates of the prisons, this paper reasons that the prisons are better understood by reexamining the role of the captured black soldiers, women, and the remaining prison material culture, looking at how the prisoners survived, which ultimately upends the military prison scholarship.

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  No Place in American History: Remembering and Forgetting the Sultana Disaster (2018-2019)

  Eli Baker

  Elias J. Baker grew up in central Arkansas, receiving his Bachelor's degree in History from Hendrix College in 2009. He earned his Master of Arts degree in History from the University of Mississippi in 2014, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate. His research interests include social and cultural history during the Civil War era and Reconstruction, and Civil War memory. His dissertation examines the history and memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster in April, 1865, focusing on the ways various groups, including survivors, contemporary observers, historians, and fiction writers remembered, commemorated, and politicized the tragedy. The dissertation seeks to expand understanding of the ways memories of disaster and suffering shaped communities and individuals in the generations following the Civil War.

  This project examines the historical memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster of April 27, 1865. The Sultana, ferrying recently-released federal prisoners, exploded north of Memphis, killing over 1,700 in the nation’s worst maritime disaster. Contemporaries interpreted the disaster through a variety of lenses, finding evidence of recalcitrant rebels, the heroism of Union soldiers, and critiques of Republican emancipationist wartime policy. Steamboat safety advocates deployed the disaster’s memory to successfully press Radical Republicans for the 1871 Steamboat Act, establishing the nation’s first maritime safety code. The disaster’s survivors gathered at reunions and published personal narratives to secure the Sultana, and the victims’ suffering, in popular memory and official war histories. Despite these efforts, most Americans remained ambivalent about the disaster. Familiar and fascinated with antebellum steamboat explosions, most Americans accepted the Sultana as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of steam transportation. The 1871 Steamboat Act failed to reduce accidents, as investigators hesitated to assign blame and travelers assumed the risk of disaster. Sultana survivors, though successful in attracting large crowds eager to hear their stories, saw their efforts to memorialize and historicize the disaster frustrated as the American public largely forgot the disaster. This project argues that this forgottenness is the defining feature of the Sultana disaster’s memory. This memory, grounded in a sense of injustice for the victims, finds its meaning in being forgotten in American popular history and memory of the Civil War. The project thus demonstrates the central role played by forgetting in the creation and evolution of historical memory.

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  Contraband Camps and the Freedmen's Bureau During the Civil War and Reconstruction (2017-2018)

  Kristin Bouldin

  Kristin Bouldin grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi. She earned her bachelor’s degree in history and biology at the University of Virginia in 2011 and a master’s degree in history at the University of Mississippi in 2014. Her research interests include emancipation, contrabands and freedmen during the Civil War and Reconstruction, government policies regarding African-Americans during early Reconstruction, and the role of gender in the lives of freedmen. Her dissertation explores how federal policies formulated in wartime contraband camps shaped programs and policies of the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and includes extensive detail about conditions and hardships in the camps. The dissertation aims to address a significant gap in the literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction by connecting contraband camps to the Freedmen’s Bureau. She also regularly attends numerous historical conferences, including the Southern Historical Association, the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, and the Society of Civil War Historians.

  This dissertation discusses the connections between policies developed in the contraband camps and the policies enacted by the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction. It argues that that contraband camp policies created several models for Bureau agents to follow, and that Bureau agents failed to learn from the problematic contraband camps and enacted policies and programs that had already failed in the camps. In addition, it argues that the federal government failed to provide effective oversight for the camps, which allow individual camp commanders to institute policies that often undermined the ability of the contrabands to gain economic autonomy, and that poor oversight continued under the Bureau despite a structured bureaucracy. To make these arguments, the dissertation analyzes contraband camps in Virginia, North Carolina, Washington, DC, South Carolina, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and also discusses the Bureau across the South. By including multiple camps, it provides a more complete analysis of connections between the camp and the Bureau and also discusses the specific local circumstances of each camp, such as the legality of slavery in Kentucky or the status of Washington as the national capital. Finally, the dissertation concludes by analyzing the long-term legacies of contraband camp failures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to argue that policies which originated in the contraband camps had consequences that lasted almost a century.

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  Courtroom Wars: Constitutional Battles over Conscription in the Civil War North (2016-2017)

  Nicholas Mosvick

  Nicholas Mosvick grew up in Minnesota and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi. He received a Bachelor's degree in History and Political Science summa cum laude at the University of Minnesota. He earned his J.D. and Master's degree in History from the University of Virginia through their legal history joint-degree program. After working for a prominent think tank in Washington DC on constitutional issues and amicus briefs, he decided to pursue his Doctorate from the University of Mississippi in 2013. His research interests include constitutional and legal history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as the early history of constitutional interpretation, slavery and the law, and the legacy of free labor constitutionalism. His dissertation will examine the popular constitutional discourse concerning conscription in the North during the Civil War, focusing primarily on the year of 1863 in the states of Pennsylvania and New York, where dissent was visible not only the in newspapers and streets, but inside the courtrooms as well. Mr. Mosvick hopes to add to the understanding of the changing nature of interpreting the Constitution during the Civil War Era.

  In February 1863, Congress considered a bill to create for the first-time conscription at the national level. Democratic politicians vigorously protested that the proposed act was unconstitutional and destroyed the state militias. When Congress passed the Enrollment Act, commonly known as the “Conscription Act,” on March 3, 1863, outcry from Democrats about the unconstitutionality of national conscription immediately followed. In New York and Pennsylvania, Democratic newspaper editors and politicians decreed the act the worst among the Lincoln war measures in threatening to subvert the constitutional republic and to transform the United States into a despotism under the control of an autocratic President. The act was “utterly repugnant” to the Constitution and the structure of federalism that left states to control their own militias. Quickly, these constitutional criticisms transformed into court challenges to the act. These challenges were usually based on drafted soldiers seeking writs of habeas corpus to be released from federal authority in the form of the provost marshal. New York state courts focused most often on the question of state jurisdiction, with New York’s judges divided on the meaning of the Supreme Court precedent of Ableman v. Booth and whether it precluded state court jurisdiction over questions concerning the constitutionality of Congressional acts by writ of habeas corpus. One judge, John McCunn of the City Court of New York and a well-known Democrat connected to Tammany Hall, issued an opinion in the midst of the New York City Draft Riots claiming that the act was unconstitutional, but New York’s higher courts never answered the question. In Pennsylvania, both federal and state courts decided on the constitutionality of conscription. Federal District Court Judge John Cadwalader upheld the power to conscript in two 1863 decisions, but frustrated the Lincoln administration both by maintaining a role for federal judges to review the decisions of the Boards of Enrollment and his issuing of writs of habeas corpus to release soldiers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued the most important case on the subject in November 1863, Kneedler v. Lane, finding the Conscription Act constitutional. The constitutional conservative victory was short-lived, as the decision was overturned two months later. As the history of twentieth-century conscription cases evidences, it would be the last time the courts seriously considered the constitutional argument against conscription.

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  Identity, Dissent, and the Roots of Georgia’s Middle Class, 1848-1865 (2015-2016)

  Thomas Robinson

  Thomas W. Robinson grew up in Florida and is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Mississippi. He received a Bachelor's degree in History and a Master's degree in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University. After working in public history at both museums and archives for several years, he decided to go back to school and earned a Master's degree in History from James Madison University before pursuing a Doctorate from the University of Mississippi in 2012. His research interests include southern dissent, southern nationalism, citizenship and identity, sectionalism, and the Western theater of the war. His dissertation will examine the growth of a white middle class in Georgia during the late antebellum period. This group formed their own distinct identity and ideology that often conflicted with southern norms. Many middle class Georgians became dissenters during the secession crisis and the war years and the dissertation will hone in on those men and women. Mr. Robinson hopes to broaden the understanding of the scope and source of dissent in the South during the Civil War Era.

  This dissertation, which focuses on Georgia from 1848 until 1865, argues that a middle class formed in the state during the antebellum period. By the time secession occurred, the class coalesced around an ideology based upon modernization, industrialization, reform, occupation, politics, and northern influence. These factors led the doctors, lawyers, merchants, ministers, shopkeepers, and artisans who made up Georgia’s middle class to view themselves as different than Georgians above or below them on the economic scale. The feeling was often mutual, as the rich viethe middle class as a threat due to their income and education level while the poor were envious of the middle class. Many middle class occupations, especially merchants and shopkeepers, began to be seen as dangerous, greedy outliers in the southern community. The middle class, the negative view asserted, were more interested in money and did not harmonize in the otherwise virtuous, agrarian society. This study continues through the end of the Civil War and argues that the middle class in Georgia was a source of dissent and opposed secession and then the Confederacy. This is not to say that all middle class Georgians opposed secession or the war, but many middle class Georgians vehemently opposed secession and never accepted the Confederacy. Even if they did, many quickly turned their back once it was obvious the war was not going to be short and the Confederacy was taking away many civil liberties. These were not poor, mountain folk as many previous studies have identified those who dissented from the southern cause. Instead, these were successful, mostly urban men and women who felt the war would ruin them economically while at the same time the planters, who had become their political enemies, continued to dominate power in the state post-secession. All of these factors led many middle class Georgians to reject secession and the Confederacy. In turn, the antebellum middle class in Georgia laid the foundation for the post-war power structure and the rise of the southern middle class in the New South era.

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  My Feet Are Chained: Settler Colonialism and Mobility in the Florida Borderlands, 1812-1866 (2014-2015)

  Christine Rizzi

  Christine A. Rizzi received undergraduate degrees in both History and Philosophy at Flagler College in her native state of Florida. She earned her Master of Arts degree in History from the University of Mississippi in 2012. Rizzi remained at the University of Mississippi to continue working with its excellent faculty and she is now a Doctoral Candidate. Her research interests include race, class, gender, and identity formation in 19th and 20th century America. Her dissertation will explore the intersection of mobility and identity in Civil War Era Florida among Seminole Indians, white pioneers and investors, enslaved African Americans, and Civil War soldiers and civilians. Rizzi aims to draw Florida into a broad understanding of the Civil War Era that revolves around questions of belonging, citizenship, and the role of the state.

  This project uses the framework of mobility to understand how settler colonialism functioned in a tri-racial southern borderland in the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth century Florida constituted a borderland characterized by competition for land and resources among Seminole Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. White Americans regulated mobility, i.e. the physical movement of peoples, in order to privilege their own settlement in Florida, divest native peoples of their land, and enslave people of African descent. Beginning in 1812 and lasting through the first half of the 1860s, white Americans used legislation, the settlement of white families, the solidification of a slave system, and warfare against the Seminole Indians to Americanize the Florida peninsula by creating a white supremacist settler colony. Native and black peoples, however, used their own idiosyncratic forms of movement to resist americanization and the settler colonial system. The Civil War, itself a settler colonial war in Florida, witnessed the last gasp of the settler colonial system in Florida as slavery ended in 1865 and the Seminole Indians secured their authority in the state. White supremacy, however, would continue to reign in Florida through violence, white political control, and the rise of the tourism industry alongside Jim Crow segregation. The following project demonstrates the overriding importance of physical mobility to the process of national expansion and settlement, the persistence of borderland conflicts in the South after the colonial period, and the existence of a tri-racial South wherein native peoples wielded significant power and influence beyond the Removal Era.

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  The Spectre of Savagery: Interpreting Racial Violence at Civil War State Parks (2013-2014)

  Boyd Harris

  Boyd R. Harris hails from the foothills of North Carolina and is currently a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Mississippi. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and graduated with a double major in Peace, War, and Defense and History in 2003. Harris received his Masters of Arts in History from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2010. His research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century American history, with an emphasis on public history and memory. His dissertation will examine the creation and development of Civil War battlefield state parks and their role in perpetuating Lost Cause memory into the twenty-first century. During the summer he works as a seasonal park ranger at Appomattox Court House National Historic Park.

  The legacy of the Lost Cause influenced the development of Civil War battlefield state parks throughout the South during the Twentieth Century. Focusing on battlefields which demonstrated racial violence between white Confederate soldiers and black Union soldiers provides clarity on this ubiquitous narrative in white southern society. The history of the battles of Olustee, Poison Spring, Jenkins' Ferry, and Fort Pillow provided a direct contrast to white southern accounts of the war and emphasized the role of slavery and racial hatred. The success of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s prompted many state parks to include more of the African American narrative at these sites. Self-proclaimed defenders of the Lost Cause urged state park officials and legislators to repute new interpretations as inconsistent from the original purpose of the site, which brings into focus the changing purpose of these sites in a changing southern society. The resulting controversies created by these changes offers an insight into how the shared authority of state historic sites, between state officials, heritage organizations, academia, and the public, controlled the interpretation presented at historic sites. The advancements in historical scholarship, state park operations, and public history constantly challenge traditional narratives, but the shared authority and local nature of the state park often provided a substantial barrier toward presenting new scholarship to the public. At the heart of this debate lay the uncomfortable realities of racial violence and the inability of either side to express a shared vision of the past.

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  Missouri! Bright Land of the West: Civil War Memory and Western Identity in Missouri (2012-2013)

  Amy Fluker

  Amy L. Fluker graduated summa cum laude from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in 2008 and received her Master of Arts degree in history from the University of Mississippi in 2010. That same year, she entered the PhD program at the University of Mississippi. Her dissertation project will examine Missouri's unique role in the Civil War and distinctive mode of post-war commemoration. Fluker hopes this work will mark the inclusion of the widely neglected border states into our understanding of Civil War memory. This project argues that Missouri’s singular position as a border state not only between the North and South, but also between the East and West shaped the state’s Civil War experience as well as its memory of the conflict. During the Civil War, Missouri was a slaveholding border state on the western frontier and home to a diverse and divided population. Neither wholly Union nor Confederate, Missouri’s Civil War was bitterly divisive. In its aftermath, Missourians struggled to come to terms with what it had been about. They found no place within the national narratives of Civil War commemoration emerging in the East, namely the Lost Cause, the Cause Victorious, and the Emancipation Cause. Missourians’ sense of marginalization from these narratives resulted in a distinctive brand of Civil War memory in the state, which found expression in the paintings of famed Missourian George Caleb Bingham, the work of Civil War veterans’ organizations, and the operation of the state’s homes for Confederate and Union veterans. By allowing us to analyze Civil War memory at the personal, collective, and institutional level, these examples serve to demonstrate Missourians’ deep investment in Civil War memory. Most importantly, however, they reveal how Missouri’s Western identity shaped that memory. Ultimately, by remaining sensitive to this nuance, this project adds a new dimension to our understanding of Civil War memory.

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  The Exigencies of War: Black Military Service, Free Labor, and Education in Civil War Missouri (2011-2012)

  Miller "Bill" Boyd III

  Miller "Bill" Boyd III, a native of St. Louis, is a 1998 honors graduate of Xavier University of Louisiana. In 2006, he received a Masters in African-American Studies from Boston University. His final Masters project entitled "Privilege Lost: Shifting Creole Identity in Antebellum Louisiana" was published in The Griot: The Journal for the Southern Conference on African-American Studies in 2007, winning the organization's top honor for scholarship that year. Boyd began working on his Ph.D. in Early American History at the University of Mississippi in 2008. His dissertation, tentatively entitled "The Exigencies of War: the African-American response to the Civil War in Missouri" examines black military participation, contraband free labor, education, and the struggle for a semblance of economic and social parity in the largest border state. As a result of his scholarship, Boyd has received numerous awards and fellowships including the Robert Eldridge Seiler Supreme Court of Missouri Historical Society Fellowship and the William Foley Research Fellowship.

  In Civil War scholarship, black men’s enlistment and active participation in the war effort has been prioritized and connected directly to abolitionism. This project argues that black men’s decision to serve militarily in Missouri was more nuanced. While notions of self-sacrifice and collective emancipation encouraged some black men to join federal regiments, this study asserts that the vast majority of black Missourians based their decisions on their immediate needs and the needs of their families. As black families navigated the uneven collapse of slavery in a state not subject to the Emancipation Proclamation, many descended into utter destitution. Scores suffered and many died because of exposure, disease, and lack of food. Reflective of their desperation, most black Missouri men did not join the military to become a part of the “Sable arm” of the Union army but to earn wages to provide for themselves and their families. For African-American Missouri men, the need for food, shelter, clothing, and financial stability outweighed concerns about abolition, patriotism, or sectional reunification. Consequently, fugitive slaves, without the prospect for employment due to legal proscriptions, predominated black Missouri regiments during the Civil War. On the other hand, most men born free or freed before the war, as well as former slaves who found employment that paid better wages than the army, rejected federal military service. As free labor opportunities became more plentiful in Missouri in mid-1864, federal recruitment stagnated, resulting in the institution of the draft in the state. The fact that some black men chose not to fight does not negate their genuine desire to see slavery abolished in America. Their decisions, however, reflected their newly-found political autonomy as well as the conditions some black families faced during the war. As such, this dissertation demystifies an important aspect of black life during the Civil War and provides new pathways for scholars to think the about the varied and complex ways black men view the conflict and their freedom.

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  Maintaining Intact Our Homogeneousness: Race, Citizenship, & Reconstructing Cherokee (2010-2011)

  Rachel Smith Purvis

  Rachel S. Purvis is currently a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi. She received a Bachelor of Arts in history from the University of Arkansas in 2002. She earned a Master of Arts in history from the University of Mississippi in 2005. Purvis's research interests include nineteenth-century America, with a particular focus on race and nationalism. Her dissertation project, "'Maintaining intact our homogeneousness': Race, Citizenship, & Reconstructing Cherokee' examines the rebirth of the Cherokee Nation after the Civil War emphasizing the intersection of race, citizenship, and nationalism. The history of the Cherokee Nation in the tumultuous era following the Civil War contributes an alternative story of Reconstruction to the current scholarship, one that expands the typical timeframe and geographic scope of previous studies. Purvis was recently awarded the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship from Yale University and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The Clay Fellow performs independent research in nineteenth-century U.S. history with a special interest in the age of slavery, emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction during the two-year appointment.

  The history of the Cherokee Nation from 1866 to 1907 provides a new framework for the story of Reconstruction that expands the periodization and geographical scope of the effects of the postwar period on both mainstream America and those regulated to its margins. Although the historical narrative marks the end of Reconstruction with the political compromise of 1877, the process continued in the Cherokee Nation until Oklahoma statehood was achieved in 1907. The Cherokee Nation serves as a window of analysis that demonstrates how the process of Reconstruction was a national phenomenon. The experience of the Cherokee people and their leaders during Reconstruction bridges the gap between the historiography of the postwar period and the postwar conquest of the west, and also contributes to recent works detailing the centrality of race and slavery to the lives of nineteenth-century southeastern Indians. This dissertation project strives to contribute to the story of the struggle of the Cherokee to negotiate their place within the postwar United States through an examination of the problems of freedom unleashed in the Cherokee Nation with emancipation. Investigations of the relevant secondary literature combined with an analysis of personal correspondence, governmental reports and letters from the holdings of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Cherokee laws, Cherokee leaders' correspondence, and Cherokee Nation protests and memorials against federal government intervention in their affairs discussed in this project reveals that the Cherokee adapted the prevailing racial classifications of nineteenth-century America in an effort to use these categories of difference to assert their uniqueness and independence as a sovereign and legitimate nation. Chapter one examines the Treaty of 1866 with an analysis of the document and its many stipulations. The second chapter looks at the struggle of Cherokee leaders to defeat numerous bills introduced in Congress to extend federal control over Indian Territory. Chapter three explores the important and contentious issue of Cherokee citizenship and its connection to native sovereignty. The final chapter reveals that federal protection of Cherokee freedmen continued beyond the official end of Reconstruction.