Category Archives: Reconstruction

Holocaust Remembrance Day 2021

27 Wednesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Civil War sesquicentennial, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Holocaust, Memory, Reconstruction, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)

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Holocaust survivor Ignaz Feldmann shows the Ohrdruf gallows to Eisenhower (far right) and others, April 12, 1945

I was reading the social media feed of an email acquaintance a few days ago, a prolific and well-regarded historian of the Civil War Era, who noted that he was starting to believe that the memory and historiography of post-Civil War Reconstruction seem to be supplanting our remembrance of the actual fighting that occurred between 1861-65. That is becoming my sense as well. How could it not given events of the past several years? We have seen the same phenomenon with the popular memory of the Second World War over the past three quarters of a century. Battles make for riveting narratives filled with interesting characters behaving shamefully or courageously, often at the same time. War’s aftermath however is always complicated and, in comparison to tales of the battlefield, almost always unheroic. No one wants to study shabby compromises. I can’t help but think of all these things this January 27th, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I don’t wish to go too much into the details at the moment because it’s still a ways off, but some colleagues and I are working on a project related to the Shoah that will come to fruition sometime in the future. Specifically our project covers the American response to the war and Holocaust before, during, and after the conflict. It’s a fascinating topic and we intend to cover it thoroughly. The historical memory of the Holocaust began before the war ended: on April 12, 1945–four weeks prior to what became V-E Day–Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar N. Bradley, George S. Patton and Troy H. Middleton toured the Ohrdruf labor and concentration camp. Benjamin Runkle wrote a piece for Tablet magazine two years ago about Eisenhower’s role in not just ensuring the documentation of the liberation of the camps, but his work–mistakes and all–in accommodating displaced persons after the war’s end. The 75th anniversary of the Second World War’s end was last spring. That was only part of the story; as in post-1865 America, post-1945 Europe was hardly at peace. These next few years are an opportunity to examine what came immediately after Germany’s surrender, in all its complexity.

(image/photographer, William Newhouse; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park)

The Fifteenth Amendment

03 Monday Feb 2020

Posted by in Horatio Seymour, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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One of the messiest legislative enterprises in American history reached its climax 150 years ago today when the required three-fourths majority of the states–28 of 37–ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. The episode is so convoluted that, while we credit Iowa with being that 28th state and ratifying on February 3, 1870, state representatives had actually done so in January. And that’s just the beginning of the mess. There was even more confusion if the three-fourths bar had in fact been reached. For one thing two state legistlatures of the former Confederacy–Georgia and Mississippi–had also approved the amendment–even though they had not yet been “reconstructed” and legally brought back into the Federal Union. Needless to say, all this sowed further confusion into the legality of the measure designed to give African-American adult males the vote. Still, it is February 3 which we use by common consensus.

In “Incorporating New York,” my manuscript about Civil War Era & Reconstruction Era New York, I describe the Empire State’s especially tawdry response to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Horatio Seymour had run for the presidency against Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 largely on a platform of resistance to Civil Rights. Grant won that November and just before he assumed office on March 4, 1869, the U.S. House and Senate passed the amendment, on February 25 & 26 respectively to be precise. The New York State legislature ratified the Fifteenth Amendment on April 14, 1869 over the veto of Governor John T. Hoffman. Then in January 1870 a newly-installed New York legislature reversed the state’s ratification. Is such a thing permissible? It was, and remains, unclear. As it relates to the Fifteenth Amendment however all that became moot the following month when a fully required 28 states had done so. The Harper’s Weekly cartoon we see here is from March 12, 1870. It depicts annoying, but ultimately insignificant, flies representing various holdout states trying to impede the African-American man’s vote. There is only one fly with a human face, and in a great jab on Harper’s part it is that of John T. Hoffman.

Of course the Fifteenth Amendment’s gains proved short-lived. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests, and other restrictive measures became the law of the land north and south for decades until passage of the Voting Right Act of 1965.

(image/NYPL)

John Mitchel, Irish nationalist

08 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, John Purroy Mitchel, New York City, Preparedness (WW1), Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President)

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Irish nationalist John Mitchel was put on trial in 1848 and eventually sentenced to “transportation” to Tasmania. He escaped to New York City and eventually moved South to support the Confederate cause. Seventy years later his grandson would be killed in a military training exercise getting ready to go to France to fight in the First World War.

Over the past few days I have been drafting the outline for my talk at next week’s Camp Doughboy weekend on Governors Island about John Purroy Mitchel. When I have more details I will share them here. Some may recall that in early July I wrote a piece for Roads to the Great War for the 100th anniversary of his death. Space constraints prevented me from going deeper into the Mitchell family than I would have liked. JP Mitchel was the grandson and namesake of famed Irish nationalist John MItchel. Mitchel the Elder was born in 1815 and put on trial by the British in 1848 when Ireland was in turmoil during the failed European revolutions of that year. He was sentenced to exile–what at the time was called “transportation”–to the Australian outpost Van Diemen’s Land, what we today call Tasmania. There on the Van Diemen penal colony too was Thomas Francis Meagher.

Mitchel and Meagher independently escaped to New York City. Mitchel ended up Brooklyn, living on Union Street and working as a journalist when he wrote his memoir Jail Journal; or Five Years in British Prisons. As the secession crisis heat up he eventually took his family down south, first to Tennessee and as the war went on to Richmond. Mitchel is testimony to the notion that life and humans are complicated; throughout his life he remained engaged in the Irish freedom struggle but was a staunch defender of slavery and the Confederacy. Mitchel was all in for the Confederate cause and all three of his sons served. Ironically two of the boys fought against the Meagher’s Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg in December 1862. One of Mitchel’s sons was killed in Pickett’s Charge near the Codori farm and another died while commanding Fort Sumter in 1864. The third, James, was wounded several times and lost an arm. Mitchel worked as a journalist for several Southern papers supporting President Davis. Ulysses S. Grant because a frequent foil after the general moved east in 1864. As the war wound down Mitchel escaped Richmond with Jefferson Davis’s entourage but was eventually captured and held at Fort Monroe before being released late in 1865. He soon became an editor with Benjamin and Fernando Wood’s New York Daily News, a Democratic vehicle that had given Lincoln much grief during the war and afterward turned it wrath on Reconstruction.

Mayor John Purroy Mitchel (center in top hat) and Cardinal John Murphy Farley reviewing St Patrick’s Day parade, March 17, 1914

John Purroy Mitchell was born in the Bronx in 1879, four years after his grandfather’s death. For reasons that are not clear to me, JP Mitchel was raised Catholic whereas his grandfather had been a Presbyterian. These were not small matters in Irish and Irish-American communities. I am assuming the Catholicism came from his mother’s side; the Purroys were Catholics who had come to New York City from Venezuela. I’m not going to rehash the Mitchel story here, though I probably will go into it more over the coming week as we get closer to Camp Doughboy. By the time he became mayor of New York City in January 1914 John Purroy Mitchel was thoroughly engaged in the Reform movement to clean up government. When war came later that year he was one of the earliest advocated for American Preparedness. It is intriguing to think of Mitchel being so actively engaged in the Preparedness Movement. Many Irish and Irish-Americans supported the Germans because they were fighting the British.

Like his grandfather during the American Civil War however, John Purroy Mitchel was all in for the Allied cause, eventually giving his own life on that Louisiana air field in July 1918. The world is indeed a complicated place.

(top image from The Citizen uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Domer48; bottom, Library of Congress)

New York City, July 1868

04 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Andrew Johnson, Gettysburg, Horatio Seymour, New York City, Reconstruction, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Vicksburg

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I would be remiss if I did not at least briefly mention that the Democratic National Convention began here in New York City 150 years ago today. This was the first presidential election since the end of the war, the assassination of Lincoln, and impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The Republicans had nominated Ulysses S. Grant in Chicago almost two months earlier. Grant would face the winner in the general election that fall. The Democratic field was wide open. President Johnson even sent a representative to take the pulse of the situation and see about maybe running. Few thought that Johnson would get the bid. Instead, George H. Pendleton of Ohio was the favorite coming in. Other leading prospects included Horatio Seymour of New York, Thomas A.Hendricks of Indiana, and Winfield Scott Hancock, one of the heroes of Gettysburg. The Democrats were meeting at Tammany Hall’s new wigwam on 14th Street that had been rushed into completion in time for the convention.

Very little actually happened at the wigwam on July 4, 1868. They did have a reading of the Declaration of Independence, which was a Tammany Fourth of July tradition. There was some talk about holding meetings that evening but that was quickly scuttled because of the holiday. This was all taking place five years after the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. If you know your Gettysburg, you know that the Tammany regiment played a big role in that battle and has a prominent marker at the High Water Mark.

Most of the action that day took place a little farther south at the Cooper Institute. In a sort of shadow assembly, the Soldiers’ and sailors’ Convention was taking place there. Many former general were present including William B. Franklin and Henry Slocum. The preferred candidate here seemed to be Winfield S. Hancock. The South and West were widely represented at Cooper Union, just as they would be at the wigwam starting on July 5. In a precursor to the events that would transpire at the wigwam over the course of that hot week, Major General Ewing’s speech was a refutation of reconstruction.

In the next week I intend to go at least a little deeper into the convention held here in New York City 150 summer ago. Suffice it to say that the 1868 Democratic Convention was one of the most tragic and painful in American history. The only political gathering that may–may–have been worse in its ugliness was the convention in Chicago 100 years after it.

(top image/Library of Congress; bottom, title page of Ewing convention speech)