Looking Beyond the Letters

A Blog Exploring the Backstories of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project

Tag: African American

African American Families’ Fight Against Apprenticeship Laws in Reconstruction Mississippi

August 15, 2025 / / 0 Comments

By Alessandra Diaz

Alessandra Diaz began working with the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi transcription and tagging team as a high school student from Queens, New York in 2023, and has continued through completing her first year of studies at Columbia University. She authored the following blog post exploring Black parents’ efforts to reconstitute their families and demand due process when faced with the unlawful apprenticing of their children.

In December 1876, a formerly enslaved African American man named Jacob Hodges wrote to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone regarding an ongoing investigation into the kidnappings of two African American children.[1] One of these children was his twelve-year-old son, Thomas Hodges. The other, nine-year-old Alexander Ward, was the son of a formerly enslaved woman, Harriet Ward. Hodges and Ward went to insurmountable lengths to spur Mississippi and Tennessee state authorities into returning their children after they had been kidnapped and forced into unlawful apprenticeships. A series of letters from December 1876 to June 1877 between Hodges, Ward, their lawyers, and the Mississippi government showcase the harrowing yet resilient battle many African Americans fought against discriminatory laws that were meant to keep them in a cyclical state of enslavement. To have a family outside of racialized state control—after enslavers tore apart enslaved families for centuries—was a right African Americans sought relentlessly during enslavement and after national emancipation.

Hodges and Ward’s legal battles came in the wake of the Mississippi Black Codes, signed and passed in the state legislative sessions of November and December of 1865. These laws, which ranged from criminalizing the unemployment of formerly enslaved men to banning all freed people from carrying firearms, explicitly aimed to limit their civil and economic rights and control their livelihoods. One of these laws targeting the labor of formerly enslaved people was entitled “An Act to regulate the relation of master and apprentice, as relates to freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes.” This allowed law enforcement to assign those African American children whom they deemed to be abandoned to a “master or mistress” (court’s legal term) to preside over them, which in turn exerted oppressive control over African American families and their subsequent fracturing.[2]

Former enslavers exploited this law further, creating illegal apprenticeships through kidnappings, coercion, or against the will of the children’s families. If the Hodges and Ward children had been abandoned or if their parents had consented, the apprenticeship would have been lawful. However, because the parents did not consent, and made it clear that they did not, it was an illegal kidnapping. While this law outlined the rights of parents to recover their children if they were illegally apprenticed, former enslavers continued to subvert this law, as exhibited by the Hodges and War case. These loopholes diluted emancipation’s promise by creating legal opportunities for the effective re-enslavement of African American children.

Apprenticeship was the “abusive indenture of children that came in the immediate aftermath of emancipation.”[3] Specific language in the Hodges and Ward letters indicates an apprenticeship case as opposed to a regular kidnapping. Hodges explicitly used the word “bondage” about the children’s kidnapping in a January 10, 1877, letter to the governor’s secretary.[4] The terminology used to describe enslavement indicates the true aim of these apprenticeship laws: effectively re-enslaving African American children against the will of their parents by forcing them to do unpaid labor. Mississippi Judge B. C. Sims, who presided over the case and issued the warrants for the arrest of the kidnappers, wrote to the same governor’s secretary on December 29, 1876, that the two children had been taken by the two white men to “be held in service by them” against the “dignity and peace of the State of Mississippi.”[5] One witness had also described the children, in a letter written on January 28, 1877, as having been “driving a gin,” or cleaning and separating cotton before traveling eight miles to Celina, Tennessee.[6] To the parents, this is an illegal kidnapping and forced bondage. Under the apprenticeship law, however, this could have been perfectly legal.

Legal Document from Jacob Hodges; January 28, 1877. Courtesy of the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. 

Furthermore, while it is not explicitly stated that the men who kidnapped the children, William Williams and Stokes Wilhite, had previously been the enslavers of the two parents, Hodges and Ward themselves had previously been enslaved. Former enslavers commonly sought to immediately apprentice the children of families they had previously enslaved.[7] There is also evidence in census records that Williams enslaved people while a farmer in the 1860s in Franklin, Tennessee. He had enslaved, among others, one male, aged 24 years old, and one woman, aged 18 years old.[8] Hodges and Ward were, at the time of the kidnapping, farm laborers under the employment of a man named George C. Coleman. Coleman owned the farm where the two parents worked in 1876.[9] There is no evidence of George C. Coleman in the 1860 slave schedules that indicates he knew or enslaved Hodges or Ward.

Historian Mary Niall Mitchell asserts that former enslavers commonly used apprenticeship as a justification for kidnappings. She states that planters or sharecroppers exploited “the dependency of children…and tried to create for themselves a pool of unfree labor.”[10] Williams and Wilhite’s actions and the parents’ reactions were similar to cases wherein African American parents, especially mothers, would try the case in court. Mothers like Harriet Ward would be denied the rights to their children because they were seen as unfit, usually due to poverty and unemployment. Mitchell cites an example of a New Orleans judge, who said, in an 1864 case, that “we think it very probable our course has been misrepresented by some mothers, who think they can support themselves & family.”[11]

The American legal system seldom sided with women and families who attempted to regain guardianship over their children and were seen as being unfit or unreliable. However, as Harriet Ward did, these mothers did not submit their children to these laws. Mitchell explains how family members “all appealed to the Freedmen’s Bureau for assistance in obtaining custody of children.”[12] The Freedmen’s Bureau was an especially common resource that many families sought for legal representation when appealing to the courts. Although sometimes the Bureau would side with the former enslaver and allowed them to keep the children who had been kidnapped, they also sent letters and petitions on behalf of families to authorities. Regardless, African American families sought legal representation and fought incessantly for their right to their children throughout the presence of apprenticeship laws.

The kidnappings of Alexander and Thomas were thus contextualized by a pattern of African American families pushing against apprenticeship laws that allowed for the legal separation of them from their children. Even after the kidnappers, Williams and Wilhite, were correctly identified, authorities took a negligent approach towards the case. Initially, a chancellor named L. Haughton issued a writ of Habeas Corpus for the children in early January 1877 and hired officers to deliver the writ to the kidnappers, which would hopefully lead to an arrest.[13] A writ of Habeas Corpus meant that whoever was being detained must appear in front of a court to determine the legitimacy of their detention (this writ was issued for the children, not the kidnappers).

For an unknown reason, Ward and Hodges were required to pay the officer an extra ten dollars on top of his daily salary to go to Tennessee and rescue their children. Following their payment to the officer, the parents felt “assured that [their] children would be returned to [them].”[14] However, as Hodges explained in the January 10th letter, after three days, the officer had not succeeded. The officer had remained in Aberdeen and did not attempt to uphold the agreement. Unfortunately for Ward and Hodges, “it was entirely too late to put the papers into the hands of another officer,” and they were not reimbursed or given another opportunity to request this kind of investigation again. Hodges “complained” (as described in the cover of his letter) to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone that the officer’s negligence was a violation of their civil rights. He claimed that had the kidnapped children been white, “the action of the officer would have been different; this is in direct violation of the pledges made on the stump by all democratic speakers before the two Elections prior.”[15] Hodges was livid at the law enforcement that had failed their families. He was adamant that the law had been violated, and he deserved due process.

The parents also had a white attorney, M. M. Cummings, and the aforementioned Judge B. C. Sims, a white justice of the peace, who acted as intermediaries between the parents and the state. Cummings had encouraged Hodges to file a request for the writ of Habeas Corpus. This places the kidnapping in the category of detention and forced servitude, as once again, the writ was issued for the children. The point of the writ would be that law enforcement could legally obtain the children and bring them before the court. Cummings also requested on January 19, 1877, that Justice Sims and Chancellor L. Haughton place a warrant out for the arrest of the alleged kidnappers.[16] The warrant was issued after the aforementioned failed attempts to arrest the kidnappers. Cummings also delayed in his request that the Governor of Tennessee be involved in the case, while also denying the Judges’ culpability in the late issuing of the warrants. Two other authority figures, Aberdeen Mayor Thomas S. Sykes and state senator R. O Reynolds, were also sent letters enclosing the documents of the case for them to review. Sykes would later petition Secretary Kinloch Falconer and Governor Stone on behalf of the parents.[17]

 On June 11, 1877, Mayor Sykes wrote a brief letter to Governor Stone, saying that “Thomas & Alexander have been gone ‘till yesterday when they were returned by F. E. Stout into their custody, and that they now have the said Thomas and Alexander in their parental care.”[18] Stout was another police officer hired to deliver the writ and the warrant of arrest. After nearly six months of working with authorities and wrestling with indifferent law enforcement, while also fighting against centuries of law and psychological backing for the forced servitude of African American children, Hodges and Ward had reunited their families. At every opportunity for their intervention, the two parents made their voices heard, seeking their legal representation with their own money. They also exhibited no hesitancy in taking their case to the highest authority in the state. While the ultimate fate of their family is not documented, Hodges and Ward had nonetheless succeeded in keeping their family units whole. Their case joins the powerful historical tradition of African American families advocating for themselves and their families despite injustice.

Alessandra Diaz is a rising sophomore at Columbia University in the City of New York, studying History with a specialization in urban history of the Americas. She worked on the Civil War on Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project as a Transcription and Tagging research assistant from September 2023–June 2025. You can read her other CWRGM-related blogpost, “Mississippi Governor James L. Alcorn’s Impact on Education During Reconstruction,” here.

[1] Jacob Hodges, “Letter from Jacob Hodges to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; December 29, 1876,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 03 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-03-19.

[2] Laws of the State of Mississippi, (J.J. Shannon & Sons, 1866), 4-6, https://transcription.si.edu/project/42074.

[3] Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 403.

[4]  Jacob Hodges,”Letter from Jacob Hodges to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; January 10, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 05 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-05-15.

[5] Hodges to Stone, December 29, 1876.

[6] Jacob Hodges, “Legal Document from Jacob Hodges; January 28, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 06 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-06-16.

[7] “Mississippi Authorizes “Sale” of Black Orphans to White “Masters or Mistresses,”” A History of Racial Justice, Equal Justice Initiative. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/nov/22

[8] “1860 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedules, Schedule 2, page 41,” U.S. Census Bureau, Ancestry, accessed August 1, 2025, https://www.ancestry.com/sharing/25450302?mark=7b22746f6b656e223a227373306273722b446e586545515547366741475368524b4f5039627153534774374957424f326c2f3643553d222c22746f6b656e5f76657273696f6e223a225632227d

[9] Thomas B. Sykes, “Legal Document from Thomas B. Sykes; January 20, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 06 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-06-13.

[10] Mary Niall Mitchell, “Labor: Tillie Bell’s Song” in Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery (New York: NYU Press, 2008): 143–87.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.13944196.8, 168.

[11] Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 169.

[12] Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child, 159.

[13] L. Haughton, “Letter from L. Haughton to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; January 15, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 06 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-06-01.

[14] Jacob Hodges, “Letter from Jacob Hodges to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; January 10, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 05 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-05-15.

[15] Hodges to Stone, January 10, 1877.

[16] Jacob Hodges, “Letter from Jacob Hodges to Kinloch Falconer; January 19, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1008, Folder 06 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1008-06-09.

[17] Sykes, January 20, 1877.

[18] Thomas B. Sykes, “Letter from Thomas B. Sykes to Mississippi Governor John M. Stone; June 11, 1877,” Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Stone Series 807: Box 1010, Folder 101 in Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi, accessed August 1, 2025, https://cwrgm.org/item/mdah_807-1010-11-23.

Thinking Critically About Our Data

August 22, 2023 / / 0 Comments

By Lindsey R. Peterson

Increasing quantities of data are being made available online, making it easier to lose sight of humanity in digital spaces. Therefore, it is essential for diverse groups of users — scholars, educators, archivists, librarians, students, and the public — to evaluate the quality of online resources. This often means critically assessing our data and its uses, including if the representation of the people in the collection and its data is equitable. Users should be asking whether the data produced by digital editions is replicating, amplifying, or challenging inequalities and stratifications in contemporary society. This post introduces users to an expansive (but not exhaustive) list of questions to ask of data in digital editions based on our own exploration of the data we are producing at the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project (CWRGM). Consequently, it is designed to aid educators invested in teaching data literacy and accompanies CWRGM’s “Exploring Data in Digital Editions” lesson plan. Fundamentally, it seeks to remind users of data’s human element.

USING DIGITAL EDITIONS

Digital editions produce massive amounts of data for scholarly, educational, and public use. Implicit within digital editions are concerns about equity. The Data Equity Framework is an online resource advocating for equity in data science. They note, “Data science methods can produce results, but only through interpretation can we garner any useful meaning from them.” Rather than being infallible, they remind us that processing data is subjective. They note, “It’s a combination of our best understanding of the limitations of the data, the methodology, and the content.” Data, however, often seems objective. Therefore, issues of equitable data are even more critical, as users mistakenly equate data with fact. This can lead users to overlook the need to evaluate online resources. While this post is specifically about documentary editions, the digital humanities seek to help users uncover and explore the subjective nature of data.

The following questions are designed to push users to analyze: Whose voices are represented in these collections and how? Whose voices are absent and why? It is imperative for users to critically evaluate the data produced by digital editions. Throughout this post, I offer several questions to help users do just that by providing examples from CWRGM where I work as the project’s co-director alongside Dr. Susannah J. Ural.

These key questions of analysis are designed to assist users who want to evaluate online resources. Specifically, I will review the data created by CWRGM, paying particular attention to equity and representation. But I also reflect on open access, digital accessibility, and usability. These questions can serve as a guide for facilitating discussions about data literacy, the humanities, and digital editions in the K-12 and post-secondary classroom. CWRGM even offers a 12th grade lesson plan at the website to help users do just that, which users can find here.

KEY QUESTIONS TO EVALUATE ONLINE RESOURCES:

  1. What kinds of qualitative and quantitative data does the project produce and how is it generated and maintained?
    1. For example, is it by metadata, indexing, transcriptions, images, mapping/GIS coordinates, annotation, or something else?
    1. Is it open? What programs generate the data and how is it created?
  2. How does the edition’s data impact how people use the edition and what they know about the subjects/people contained in the collection?
  3. How are people represented by the data?
    1. For example, is it by a marker on a map, name, a group identity, or something else?
  4. How does this representation shape what can be learned about the subjects/people in the collection?
  5. What are the potential limitations and/or dangers of these representations or lack of representations?
  6. How can the digital edition address or subvert these possible limitations?
  7. How can users’ work—such as annotation, research, or art—address or subvert these possible limitations?
  8. While these questions are useful in the abstract, diving into the data found within CWRGM demonstrates how these ideas and inquiries can be framed when looking at a specific digital edition. I also offer examples of potential issues and opportunities found within CWRGM’s data.
Petition to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; March 24, 1876

Petition to Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames; March 24, 1876. Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.

WHAT IS CWRGM?

CWRGM is a digital edition that is digitizing 20,000 documents sent to the governors of Mississippi during the American Civil War and Reconstruction (1859–1882). Americans from all backgrounds wrote to the state’s governors with their concerns, and after 1865, this included African American authors. With NEH/NHPRC-funding, along with other support, these records are made freely available online. They include high-quality images of the original documents alongside transcriptions, which also feature annotated subject tags.

Document metadata, in-text subject tags, and annotations are designed to increase the discoverability of the people within the collection. They can help shine a light on historically marginalized people such as African Americans, women, and impoverished people. But the project also generates massive amounts of quantitative data for research and classroom use. New documents become available every few months until the project’s completion in 2030. The quantitative data is made freely available on the website and is updated every six months.

The documents housed at CWRGM provide an example of how to evaluate online resources. The methods our research team employs to increase discoverability within these collections create fruitful opportunities for users to think critically about how data is produced, the ethical implications of that data, and the data’s opportunities and its limitations. To explore these possibilities, I will refer to the African Americans subject tag and its cooccurrences file. 

Screen capture of subject tags and facets under the Military Units category at CWRGM.

Screen capture of subject tags and facets under the Military Units category. Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view all available military unit subject tags at CWRGM.

WHAT IS A CWRGM SUBJECT TAG?

When project researchers identify language that falls under one of CWRGM’s nine subject tag categories, they link it to an internally controlled vocabulary. For example, various references to enslaved people (such as servants, slave, servile population, etc.) are tagged with the controlled subject term “African Americans–Enslaved People.” A tag is added to a document no more than once. Then it generates an index of all documents containing it in the collection. While indexes like these are incredibly useful to users, we should always evaluate online resources like this. We can start by asking:

  1. How easy or challenging was it to find the data and methods on the project website and why does this matter?
    1. What benefits are created by subject tagging or indexing a collection? How can they aid users?
  2. How can these indexes make records pertaining to historically marginalized people more discoverable?
  3. What are some issues that may arise?

For example, while every document is drafted and goes through two stages of review by different CWRGM researchers (per CWRGM’s tagging protocols), subject tags are applied by humans and can be overlooked and misapplied in the collection. Furthermore, the boundaries of every subject tag are debatable. For example, how do you apply the African Americans tag when the subject is biracial? The authors’ meaning or intent can also be unclear. Sometimes tags can be added that don’t belong there or should have been added when they do apply. Multiple stages of review and transparency, including providing open access to the project’s protocols or explanatory subject tag annotations, are therefore essential to addressing these concerns.

WHAT IS A CWRGM COOCCURRENCES FILE?

Subject tagging creates an index of the documents within the collection that contain that subject tag. For example, this is an index of all of the documents in the collection that refer to African Americans. A cooccurrences file then exports the other subject tags that were also tagged in documents that received the African Americans subject tag. This file allows users to see what other terms are most frequently discussed alongside that subject tag. Again, users should evaluate these online resources:

  1. How easy or challenging was it to find the quantitative data and methods on the project website and why does this matter?
  2. What kinds of information can you find in a concurrences file? How valuable is it?
  3. Are there potential biases or stereotypes that could be reinforced by the data?

CWRGM users will find, for example, that to obtain other cooccurrences files they must email the CWRGM research team. Balancing a need to protect finalized versions of documents with the technology available to the project led to this decision. But emailing the CWRGM editorial team for cooccurrence data still creates a barrier to access.

COOCURRENCES & REPRESENTATION

Users may also note the potential issues and opportunities regarding representation in the collection’s data. For example, the African Americans subject tag shows a high correlation with tags connected to criminality. This could highlight and even reinforce long standing stereotyping of Blackness with deviance and criminality. Conversely, it also shows that criminal records and criminal proceedings may be a fruitful avenue for exploring Black experiences during the era. This may lead users to investigate white Americans’ use of the legal system to control, restrict, and subjugate African Americans during Reconstruction. It also can reveal Black efforts to resist the racially based adjudication of the law.

People can also be reduced to a group identity in the collection’s data. Where white men, are often readily identifiable by first name and surname, other historically disempowered people are less likely to be found this way. Many women for example are listed as Mrs. David Johnson. Enslaved people are rarely named and when they are, it is typically unclear what their self-identified names were. This document offers a rare opportunity where enslaved people included their first name and surnames. Other groups, such as the patients at the Mississippi State Mental Health Hospital are overwhelmingly referred to as inmates.

Annotations tied to subject tags, however, provide readers with missing information. They also do not alter the transcription of the original text. While CWRGM preferences tagging full names wherever possible, they also add the “African Americans–Enslaved People” subject tag to the document to link all references to enslaved people under one subject tag. This practice allows users to more easily study the experiences of those belonging to a collective identity.

WHAT IS A CWRGM ANNOTATED DOCUMENT?

Pop-up annotation for the “Convict Labor. Mississippi. Leasing Program” subject tag at CWRGM.

Pop-up annotation for the “Convict Labor. Mississippi. Leasing Program” subject tag on Copy of contract; October 27, 1874. Courtesy of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.

Pages include an archival-quality digital file of the original document alongside a transcription that includes annotated subject tags. You can see an example here. Subject tag annotations provide users with historical context, explanation, and clarification for how the term is used in the collection. While the document transcriptions and their subject tags produce the collections’ data, the annotated documents themselves offer opportunities to overcome some of the shortcomings of the collection’s data. These possibilities present exciting questions:

  1. How can reading the qualitative data (documents and annotations) and using qualitative thinking impact what we know, or think we know, about the quantitative data (or subject tagging and cooccurrences files)?
  2. How does this shape what we know about history/society and our research subject/s?

Data can help point users in fruitful directions, but it contains bias and can be used in harmful ways. Incorporating qualitative reasoning using the documents themselves into our research allows users to discover more about the people within the collection—such as their names, feelings, and experiences—and uncover the human experience where quantitative data often falls short. But there are also limits to what qualitative information can provide. Even with external research, for example, many groups of people cannot be identified by name.

ANNOTATIONS & DISCOVERABILITY

Annotated subject tags and transcriptions offer exciting possibilities for increased access and discoverability in digital editions. Transcriptions, for example, can aid users with disabilities because they can be used in conjunction with online accessibility plugins, where the document images cannot.

Furthermore, adding subject tags within the document offers users (especially students) more appropriate, contemporary naming practices. It is important to keep in mind that not all members of that identity agree on the appropriate terminology or who belongs under the umbrella term.

“Jackson, Mississippi,” Elisaeus von Seutter Collection. Ca. 1800s. Sysid 96984. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Adding annotations to the subject tags can help users learn more about the people who appear in these collections. For example, we can see women’s maiden names or identify the names of an enslaved person without automatically bestowing the enslaver’s surname onto them. Furthermore, historians can offer context in places where the document’s author used coded, inappropriate, or misleading language. For example, when an author refers to penitentiary work, an annotation can provide the greater context about Mississippi’s convict leasing program to highlight the racial inequalities institutionalized within the system.

WHY THIS MATTERS?

Digital editions offer users access to primary sources and historical data on an unprecedented scale but comprise only an infinitesimal portion of the online resources available today. Society has struggled to critically evaluate the mass proliferation of information that has become available with a few quick clicks. The skills to critically evaluate online resources—how they were generated, presented, and maintained—therefore, are paramount. Turning to resources like this lesson plan, the Data Equity Framework, and digital humanities projects like CWRGM can begin to provide users with the tools and resources they need to ask critical questions of online information and most importantly, recenter the human element within the data.

Lindsey R. Peterson, Ph.D. is co-director of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project and the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion). Thanks to funding from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, she attended the 2023 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) where she completed the Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities course. An earlier version of this piece was published as “How to Evaluate Online Resources using a Digital Edition,” a blog post she authored as part of her time at DHSI, which can be accessed here.

An Analysis of Women in CWRGM Using Metadata and Subject Tags

May 9, 2023 / / 0 Comments

by Meghan Sturges

The Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project (CWRGM) provides amazing opportunities for its graduate assistants. I was lucky enough to serve as a metadata graduate assistant for the past two semesters while finishing a degree in Library Information Science. When choosing a topic for my thesis, I knew I wanted to analyze CWRGM to highlight how one can use this archive to find accounts of marginalized communities, like women. Using quantitative analysis, I focused on letters written by women and about African American women. Both are under-represented in narratives about the United States Civil War era, and I wanted to see if metadata and subject tagging made correspondence in both categories easier to discover.

Before digging into the analysis, one must understand how CWRGM uses the metadata and subject tags to enhance this archive. CWRGM uses a version of metadata tags established by the Library of Congress (LOC) subject authorities and subject tags created by CWRGM project leads using controlled vocabulary. Developed to fill in gaps that the metadata tags do not quite satisfy, these subject tags are what allow traditionally minimalized/marginalized groups to become more discoverable in the CWRGM archive. For example, the subject tag Historically Free and Newly Freed African Americans was used in my research. This subject tag covers a variety of groups and experiences that researchers may not think to use when searching or terms that are now considered offensive and/or outdated. What CWRGM has done is make content more accessible by being thoughtful with its use of language.

As I began my analysis of the site in the Fall 2022, first I browsed the Explore the Collection page for any subject tag that revealed groups of women.[i] After examining the list of categories, I chose several for further investigation: Ladies Military Aid Societies, Widows, Nurses, and Seamstresses. The results indicated that southern white women were prolific participants in the Civil War. Of the 180 letters examined from this specific search, 57 or 31.6%, were written by women. Ladies Military Aid Societies had the most letters written by women, where 33.9% of all letters under this category were authored by women. These messages demonstrate that women raised funds, sewed uniforms, volunteered as nurses, and one woman, Martha S. Boddie, even offered her jewels to buy a gunboat for the Confederacy (see below).

Letter from Martha S. Boddie to Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus; February 1862. Courtesy The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.

The second largest category of women writing letters is under the section for Widows. Of the 103 letters that appeared under the term Widows, 34 were written by women. As one can imagine, the war created many widows and many of these letters are from women made desperate by the loss of their source of personal and financial security. Multiple widows, for example, asked to have taxes waived or requested they be pardoned from crimes committed to support their families. In one situation, Martha Craigan wrote to Governor Charles Clark in 1863, complaining of her cotton being burned as she and her neighbors were traveling to exchange the cotton for other goods. Craigan laments, “I never would have attempted it if necessity had not had drove me to it, having been deprived of the necessaries of life for the last three years, with a large and helpless family of girls, with no husband or son to assist in making them a support.” Despite appealing to local military officials, they could offer no assistance and referred her to the governor. Many women like Craigan were left in dire situations, and Confederate state legislatures worked to find ways to increase support for military families throughout the war.[ii]

Table A: Percentage of Letters Written by Women
by Metadata and/or Subject Tag

The documents relating to African American women’s experiences were even more exciting because for too long they have been silenced in United States history. Some of this is, scholars argue, is due to the limited sources available. It was illegal for African Americans (freed or enslaved) to learn how to read or write in much of the Antebellum South, and Mississippi was no exception.[iii] So, it is fair to say less African American-authored material is available for archivists and historians, but it is not impossible to hear their voices, as scholars have increasingly shown over the last several decades. In part, this is done by looking through the narratives of others to find information. The CWRGM subject tag Historically Free and Newly Freed African Americans helps with this, and I explored these for this search. At the time of the investigation, I located 238 documents of which 83 or 34.8% mentioned African American women. To be clear, many of these documents are written by white people and, as a result, carry a white interpretation of a Black person’s experience. Still, some documents are by African-American authors and used alongside other accounts by whites, they can offer examples of African-American women’s experiences before, during, and after the Civil War.

The largest number of letters about African American women were written in 1865, right at the war’s end. Many of these take the form of issued rations and food given to Mississippians from all walks of life by the Union Army. The documented rations in Table A represent only those issued to African American women, 66% of the letters examined in this analysis. Beyond being identified as female and African American, most of these ration cards give little information about their recipients. Still, data can uncover powerful stories, and the data relating to rations tells a tale of need. A possible way for this to be further studied is to examine any correspondence or journals written by the Union officers issuing the ration cards. A few specific officers issued many ration cards, and personal reflections may provide more details about African American women and others who needed rations. Another approach is through census, newspaper, and pension records, which may offer more information about the women’s experiences. Below is a Ration return of Lieutenant Franklin Force, in which 15 days’ worth of rations were issued to one male and nine female freedmen in August of 1865.

Ration return of Lieutenant Franklin Force; August 16, 1865. Courtesy The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.

As shown in Table B below, much of the correspondence—of the documents currently available online—referencing African American women did not appear until after the war ended. Only one document was written before the war, in 1859. Twelve were written after the war; four in 1868, one in 1869, three in 1870, and four in 1871. These are not happy letters. They tell stories of murder, exploitation, and cruelty against newly freed African American women. The first letter to appear in the search referring to an African American woman was from Sheriff Robert Meeks describing the murder of Lucy McCormick, a young African American girl shot to death.

Table B: Number of Letters by Year

One does not have to be a historian to find value in these archives. CWRGM offers excellent opportunities to study metadata, highlighting the role that archival methods play in making collections more discoverable for researchers. For me, that was the most significant impact of this project, which explored the efficacy of the CWRGM metadata and subject tags. The goal was to find narratives of women, and using the website’s guidance, that was simple to do.

[i] Data for this project was based on research conducted in the Fall of 2022 and the Spring of 2023; the documents and subject tags available at cwrgm.org are always growing and evolving, so this data may not reflect what is currently available at the site.

[ii] See, for example, Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[iii] Christopher M. Span, “Learning in Spite of Opposition: African Americans and Their History of Educational Exclusion in Antebellum America.” Counterpoints 131 (2005): 26–53.

Meghan Sturges is a native Mississippian graduating with her Master of Library Information Science in May 2023 from the University of Southern Mississippi. She served as a research graduate assistant for CWRGM for the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 semesters. She has worked as a history teacher at Pascagoula High School for the past seven years. After graduation, she plans to pursue a career in Academic Librarianship.

Mississippi Women at War

March 29, 2023 / / 0 Comments

by Sarah West

To be unenfranchised does not mean that one is voiceless, nor does it mean that one must sit idly by and let the world move around them. The women of Mississippi had no official political power in the 1800s, but this did not stop southern white women from participating in political acts. They took part in political conventions as early as the 1830s to defend slavery, balked against the interventions being made on their domestic fronts, and engaged with the political process by taking their complaints directly to the executive officer of the state.

“Jackson, Mississippi,” Elisaeus von Seutter Collection. Ca. 1800s. Sysid 96984. Credit: Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History

We can find examples of those direct interactions in the records of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) project, which is digitizing the state’s governors’ papers from 1859 through 1882. These letters make it possible to hear from these women who called upon their governor for various reasons before, during, and after the Civil War. In this three-part series, we will look at how the nature and volume of these letters changed over this period and study these women’s experiences in such revolutionary times.

There is no way to gauge within this collection of letters how often women wrote the governor before the Civil War started. Still, within the span we can access, we can see that the frequency increased drastically as the war went on. Seven letters stand out from the period of April 1860 through April 1861 that reflect this trend, and each reveals women engaging in the political process to protect their family or their family’s interests. The first letter, dated April 29, 1860, comes from Jane White, who asked Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus to pardon her husband’s criminal charges. He was sentenced to five years for stealing an enslaved person. Jane gives a testament to her husband’s character but admits that it’s not “misery, trials or troubles,” but the “tender tie called love” that prompts her request. This letter stands out in the collection because of the motive in which she pleads for her husband’s return. When the war begins, the reasoning for requesting the return of a loved one predominately leaned toward safety and sustaining the family rather than the affection expressed in this instance. Serving in the war was a duty, and now soldiers’ families were expected to sacrifice the absence of their loved ones for the greater good.

It’s significant, too, that Jane White reveals no thought about how her husband’s actions may have damaged an enslaved family. The voices of African-American women are rare in the pre-emancipation portion of this collection. Still, we can find glimpses of their experiences and how white arguments about protecting the white domestic sphere could affect them. Five months earlier, for example, Governor Pettus received a petition from a free woman of color named Anne Mataw. Mississippi laws at that time made it almost impossible for her to remain in the state and remain free, so Mataw made the gut-wrenching decision to be enslaved or re-enslaved. Her petition includes Mataw’s mark, but I have found nothing else about her (yet). Did Mataw do this to protect her own family as best she could? Was this the only way she could remain near her children or husband? Scholars have argued that these were common motivators in re-enslavement petitions rather than the reason the document suggests that “slavery with a humane owner is preferable to freedom in a free state.”[1] By no means are Mataw’s experiences the same as those of the white women described in this post. But like them, she may have used the governor’s office to protect herself and her family.

Anne Mataw Petition, December 2, 1859. Courtesy The Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. Click on image to view entire document and transcription.

As tensions escalated throughout the 1860 election year, petitions from concerned women continued to arrive on Governor Pettus’s desk. In each case, the author made her case on the grounds of domestic security and family preservation. In October 1860, for example, Mary Garrett wrote on behalf of her son, who was being held on charges she never clearly defined. In this letter, Garrett reminds the Governor that she came before him with a petition for her son’s release last February. She also notes the Governor’s failure to follow through on his pledge to speak with a Judge Cothern about her son’s case, stating, “I suppose you forgot me, as the Judge states he—never got your letter he also states he was with you last July and not knowing you had a petition never hearing of your receiving any information relative to the case.” Garrett argues that Cothern assumed Pettus would have dismissed the charges and then softens her approach by asking Pettus to acknowledge that wisdom comes with age and that her son has grown up since his infraction. She asks Pettus to empathize with her, encouraging him to recall his own affectionate mother and what she likely did for her children. Determined to save her son, Mary Garrett wrote another letter that day to Major Alfred Harden that conveyed her situation and requested him to write to Pettus on her son’s behalf. It is within the scope of these interactions that we see Mary Garrett was comfortable enough to petition the Governor in person, to follow up with the Judge that is mentioned, to hold Governor Pettus accountable to his commitment, and to encourage another man of standing to intervene as well. As scholars have noted, though 19th-century women were disenfranchised, they still found ways to navigate the political realm and often did so with arguments about their familial duties as dedicated wives, mothers, or daughters.

We can see another example of this in a November 1860 letter from Mrs. J. M. Girault asking to be released from the debt that her husband incurred. She explains that if she were to repay the debt, it would leave her and her children homeless or drain her father’s estate. It is unclear whether or not Mrs. Girault owned property, but she does state that she is not requesting to be released from her half of the debt and claims that if it had been in her power to do so, the debt would have never been incurred. Mississippi was the first state to allow married women to own property; this law was enacted in 1839 and meant that a married woman’s property could not be seized to pay her husband’s debts.[2] This letter suggests that Girault still retained the means to pay her half of the deficit and her willingness to assert herself to protect her family’s financial standing.

Though the Civil War started on April 12, 1861, Mississippi seceded from the Union four months before this date, meaning militia were already forming in the state. When the Copiah Horse Guard mustered into service in March 1861, Josephine Martin tried to ensure her husband did not join the unit. She asked Governor Pettus to exempt her husband from service because her “health was bad and [she] needed his attention at all times.” She admitted that “his business also (not being settled up)” required attention, but it’s worth noting that the first concern Mrs. Martin asserted focused on her immediate needs. Indeed, the document is an answer to a request for a statement of why Mr. Martin would not be able to join the Copiah Horse Guard. This was just the first of many requests to reach Pettus’s desk once the war was underway. What makes it significant for our purposes, though, is that Mrs. Martin is writing it because Mr. Martin did not want to. She was asserting herself on behalf of her family and her health to keep her husband at home despite the pressures of their community, the state, and the Confederate nation.

Finally, in early April 1861, just one day before Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Sarah P. E. Simmons, a teacher of 20 years, contacted Governor Pettus. She was applying for a scholarship to the University of Mississippi on behalf of her son, Jeremiah Ellington. His father, Sarah Simmons explains, was killed by someone who held a position of authority. She feared that this person might use leverage to deny Ellington’s application. Simmons included several references in the hope that Pettus would grant the scholarship. Despite the fact that conflict abounded, Sarah Simmons does not appear to have been affected by the rage militaire that inspired so many enlistments that spring. Instead, she hoped her son would be able to attend college so he “may prove worthy of this his native Sunny Land.”

Looking at letters sent to the governor of Mississippi before the outbreak of the Civil War gives the reader a glimpse of how middling and upper-class women of the state asserted their priorities and sought to protect their families. They advocated for love, on behalf of their children, for the betterment of their own financial situations, and a better quality of life. We also have a case where similar motivations may have influenced the actions of a free woman of color. Though the letters in this collection from women before the war are few, it shows a precedent of their political engagement in an increasingly politically charged environment. The next post will show how women’s engagement—of all classes— expanded during the war and analyze the impact of these developments.

[1] For more on Mississippi antebellum laws regulating the rights of free people of color, see this essay at Mississippi History Now; see also Ted Maris-Wolf, Family Bonds: Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia.

[2] Woody Holton “Equality as Unintended Consequence: The Contracts Clause and the Married Women’s Property Acts.” The Journal of Southern History 81, no. 2 (2015): 313–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43917912.

Sarah West is a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Mississippi and the Assistant Editor of the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. She earned her M.A. in History from California State University, San Bernardino in May of 2022 and served as a 2021 Summer intern on the CWRGM project, which inspired her Master’s thesis, titled The “Honorable” Woman: Gender, Honor and Privilege in the Civil War South.

“Skilets are rusting for the wont of some Thing to put in them”: African American Citizens Writing to the Governor

February 21, 2023 / / 0 Comments

By DeeDee Baldwin

In the early months of 1871, Mississippi Governor James Lusk Alcorn received letters from three young Black men: George Fulcher of Eggs Point, Albert Snowden of Lauderdale County, and G. A. Watkins of West Point. All three letters are poignant examples of African Americans embracing both their new citizenship—including the right to address the governor directly—and their new access to education and literacy. The letters are difficult to read due to the irregular handwriting and spelling that would be expected of men who had only recently been able to enjoy the right to education, but that only adds to their power.

On January 19, George Fulcher of Washington County took his “Pen in hand To drop [Governor Alcorn] a few lines” about the difficulties faced by the people in his community. According to the 1870 census, Fulcher was a farm hand who was born in Mississippi around 1840 and lived near Eggs Point with his wife, Polly, and two young children. Fulcher hoped that Alcorn “will Not Be orfended at my Bold undertakeen for the laws Are made By you in this State & we poor colord peepel can Not git a liven.” The landholders are charging too much for rent, he writes, stating in language that is both colloquial and evocative, “the Skilets are rusting for the wont of some Thing to put in them.” He suggests that Alcorn appoint someone to take care of things, and he maintains that these poor people could “Rase Stock for the goverment if . . . the govenment Will give them a Start.”

“This is Writt From George Fulcher, A Colord man Live in Washington County Miss” Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

Albert Snowden was only about nineteen years old when he wrote to Alcorn on March 19; the 1870 census of Lauderdale County lists him as a student born circa 1852. In his letter to the governor, the young man expresses his concern about violence and unrest surrounding the fiery riot in Meridian earlier that month. (More information about the riot can be found here.) Snowden attributes the unrest to troublemaking “whits from alabama.” Like Fulcher, Snowden acknowledges both his boldness in writing to the governor and the governor’s obligation to serve the people: “I hope you will Knot Think hard of me for this For if we dont look forth to the Gover, and the Leg a lacor [legislature] of the State who will we look to.” Snowden went on to enjoy a long life as a farmer in Livingston, Madison County, where he was documented on the 1880-1920 censuses. He had at least eighteen children with his first wife, Octavia, and second wife, Ida. The census tells us that he owned his home and farm.

G. A. Watkins, a laborer born about 1840, according to the 1870 census in West Point, wrote to Alcorn on March 17 to request any printed material that the governor might be able to send him: “all the Papers you has & Got no uce for them Pleas Send them We Want & Nede Every thing that We Can get for infermation for our voters in this County.” Watkins worries that the Democrats are misinforming people and “making them beleve that the Republicans ant Doing Nothing for the Colord Race,” and he wants to set up a club to organize and educate voters. He tells Alcorn that the people are suspicious of anything that doesn’t come directly from the governor. The letter is cosigned by Qinson Petty and E. R. Atkins.

“Pleas all the information & Papers That you Send us Deirect them to G. A. Watkins Colord Westpoint Miss” Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

One of the myths that arose around Reconstruction was that formerly enslaved people were unprepared for the privileges of citizenship. Many White Americans claimed that these Black men were too ignorant, too amoral, too intellectually inferior to participate in government. Letters like these, along with many petitions that bear African Americans’ signatures, show that they were more than ready and willing to exercise their citizenship, confronting the racism and poverty described in their letters to reach for something more.

We are fortunate to have these documents at all. Until recent years, archives and museums prioritized white voices, neglecting to collect materials that documented the everyday experiences of people of color. These men’s letters were saved as part of a governor’s papers, but one has to wonder how many more letters like them—to the governor, to mayors, to their representatives in the legislature—were lost. Just over 150 Black men served in the Mississippi legislature from 1870-1894, and the CWRGM collection includes many documents by and about them. But we can only imagine how many of their constituents’ letters, to say nothing of their own papers, have been lost to us.

George Fulcher, Albert Snowden, and G. A. Watkins were not legislators. They were ordinary men of their time and place. But they were also extraordinary. Not only had these three men likely learned to read and write as adults in the few years since emancipation, but they were bold enough to use their pens to demand the attention of their governor, shining a light on the problems and struggles they saw around them. They now had a civic voice, and they now had a written voice, and they were determined to use both.

DeeDee Baldwin is the History Librarian at Mississippi State University Libraries, joining the faculty in 2017 after ten years working in the Manuscripts division. She is a past president and current board member of the Society of Mississippi Archivists, and she will soon be a co-chair of the Association for Documentary Editing’s Education Committee. Her website, Against All Odds (link https://much-ado.net/legislators/), documents the lives of over 150 Black men who served as legislators in Mississippi during and just after Reconstruction.

If You Build It, And They Come . . . Does The Site Work For Them?

January 19, 2023 / / 0 Comments

By Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D.

CWRGM had a wonderfully productive year in 2022. We made 3,980 additional documents freely available at our website (our total is now just over 7,000 of a projected 20,000 documents). Each of these digitized documents contains metadata, transcriptions, and subject tags that enhance discoverability. We also made incredible progress on annotation, led by Senior Associate Editor Lindsey Peterson, who oversaw the team’s annotations for 991 places, 103 events, 68 organizations and businesses, 195 occupations, 55 social identifiers, five vital statistics. That means, by December 2022, all but 20 documents at CWRGM.org had some annotation and they averaged five annotated subjects per document (see our Annotation Protocols if you have questions about this process).

We also retained most of our talented 2021-2022 team members and added more students representing multiple colleges, universities, and community colleges from across the state: the University of Southern Mississippi, Millsaps University, Mississippi State University, The Mississippi University for Women, and Pearl River Community College. We lost two team members to other positions, but at least one of them secured that work in part due to what they had learned with us, which is wonderful to see . We were also joined by a first-rate new Assistant Editor, Sarah West (you can see our current research team and our alums here). We hosted an annual educator workshop that generated three more CWRGM lesson plans and led our first National History Day (NHD) workshop for students from Council Bluffs, Iowa (Kirn Middle School and Abraham Lincoln High School) and from Akron-Westfield, Iowa (Akron-Westfield Middle School). If you are leading or part of an NHD project, I encourage you to check out our NHD resource page and video.

While we’re pleased with this progress, Lindsey and I couldn’t help but wonder how users were exploring our site and if there are ways to improve their experience. We offer tips on how to “Explore the Collection.” And analytics can reveal data like how many people access the site, which pages they visit the most, and how long they stay on the site. But what about issues with discoverability and accessibility? We can gather feedback about errors or if users want to share more information about something in a document, but that doesn’t answer the question of how they explore the site and how we can make that experience as successful as possible.

Visit our “Explore the Collection” page for tips on, well, exploring the CWRGM collection.

This spring, CWRGM is focusing on that very issue, especially as it relates to the records of marginalized groups whose voices have been underrepresented in archives. Ours is a nineteenth-century collection of governors’ papers, and if you know anything about nineteenth-century Americans, it seems that everybody wrote to their governors about absolutely anything. Even people who could not write would find others to write on their behalf. We are thrilled with the diversity of our collection that spans the era of one of the most revolutionary times in U.S. history and the “finds” our volunteers and research team are making freely available to all. But we don’t know that equally diverse contemporary groups are “hearing” these voices today. That is, after all, one of our goals. We want this archive’s users to be as diverse as our collection; this is an archive for everyone, not just scholars and others who are wealthy enough to have the time and training to explore it successfully. So, how do we measure if we are accomplishing that goal? Furthermore, are users with different types of interests finding records as easily as we think they can? Is there something we could do to improve discoverability?

Lindsey and I had already tried to get at this information with simple surveys. We sent these to educators, to fellow Civil War-era scholars, to our advisory board, and we even reached out to genealogical and historical associations to send them to their entire membership. But we’ve received little feedback.

So Lindsey and I did what we always do when we hit an editorial wall — we reached out to our friends in the documentary editing community. Ben and Sara Brumfield, in particular, had some great suggestions that led us to two specific ventures this spring. The first involves partnering with The Luster Company, a consulting firm that specializes in unearthing and highlighting marginalized Black voices. The Luster Company will help us assess the current discoverability and accessibility features at our site, reach more diverse user groups to discover how they use CWRGM.org, and see if there are ways we can improve the site. We’re also working with individual chapters of the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) to share our project with their members and workshop the collection. Our goal is to introduce the chapter members to the collection and then see how they, as trained and experienced historical genealogists specializing in African-American historical research, access our rich collection to see if there are ways to improve our digital organization and search features.

We’ll report back on the results of this venture, but we’re sharing our ideas now in case other documentary editors are facing the same dilemma or if any of you have successfully resolved this issue through other means. By all means – please let us know.

Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D. directs the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. She is Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi where she directs the Center for Digital Humanities and is a senior research fellow in the Dale Center for the Study of War & Society. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the U.S. Civil War era.

Gov. Alcorn’s Secret Service Infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan – Part 2

June 1, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By Lucas Somers, Ph.D. , Asst. Prof. of History, Lindsey Wilson College

Last time, we looked at Mississippi Governor James Lusk Alcorn’s formation of a state Secret Service Bureau to combat the Ku Klux Klan in 1870. That agency sent U.S. veteran and former deputy sheriff John J. Gainey on an undercover operation to determine the identities of individuals responsible for violence against African Americans in Lafayette County. He successfully infiltrated the local KKK chapter, gained the trust of one of its members, and organized a confession witnessed by local officials.

Gainey arrived in the county seat of Oxford on July 19, 1870, but his presence in town did not remain a secret for long. The Oxford Falcon, a Democratic newspaper, even alerted their readers that “One of Alcorn’s secret detectives was in town this week.”[1] While in Oxford and before going undercover, Gainey coordinated his investigation with three civil officers: C. N. Wilson, Edwin M. Main, and W. H. Ford. Each of these men received appointments in 1869 from the previous Republican Governor Adelbert Ames—who had been himself been appointed by the U.S. Congress—which earned each of them the ire of Democratic observers even before taking their respective offices.[2] Despite Alcorn’s hope that the Secret Service would thwart Klan violence and keep the federal government at bay, many white residents of Lafayette County perceived the individuals carrying out the state’s work as vehicles of Radical Reconstruction. Nevertheless, those officials proved useful to Gainey’s investigation. Wilson provided him with information about potential persons of interest, which led Gainey to visit the plantation of Thomas Woods, located roughly fourteen miles outside of town. Gainey quickly befriended Woods’s twenty-year-old son, Ignatius “Few” Woods, and Gainey soon met other members of the local Klan as well. Few Woods even bragged to his new acquaintance that the Lafayette County chapter of the KKK had been personally organized by Nathan Bedford Forrest in April 1867. After feigning interest in their organization and earning their trust for about a week, Woods and his fellow Klan members invited Gainey to be initiated into their ranks.

“Visit of the Ku-Klux,” drawn by Frank Bellew, Harper’s Weekly, February 24, 1872.
Courtesy Library of Congress.

The story reached its climax when Gainey and Few Woods went into Oxford together one evening. After convincing his new friend to purchase some wine in town, the undercover agent secretly met with two of his local contacts, Wilson and a former sheriff named Mahon. Gainey’s plan involved coaxing Woods into recounting KKK crimes by “plying with the bottle,” while he arranged for the two civil officers to hide below them under a bridge so they could overhear the confession.[3] This plan worked to perfection as Woods revealed the names of several masked Klansmen responsible for multiple shootings of freed people in that county. Gainey then reported their identities to the Secret Service headquarters and local officers learned this crucial information as well.

Now, the particular attacks that were retold in the confession took place at the home of a “Widow Watson,” where KKK members John Conkle, Mat Goolsby, Few Woods, and others attacked an African-American man and shot him in “the back with a double barreled shot gun, forty-seven buck shot entering into him.”[4] Gainey may be describing the shooting of a freedman named Jacob Watson who lived next door to a widowed white woman named Amanda M. Watson in 1870. He was a captain in a Black militia company and led a local Union League chapter at that time as well.[5] According to other sources, earlier that year the Lafayette County Klan made a series of raids against Jacob Watson and his lieutenants, Sandy Newberry and Jake Boone, after their militia company conducted nighttime drills that “annoyed” whites in the vicinity.[6] Those sources reported that Jacob Watson received serious gunshot wounds from those Klan raids, suggesting that Woods’s confession to Gainey was describing this same attack from a few months prior.[7] Throughout the South during Reconstruction, the KKK specifically targeted Black men belonging to Union Leagues—which were local organizations designed to politically mobilize Black voters—and militias in large numbers in order to intimidate their efforts toward racial equality. African Americans continually struggled to protect their political rights and their own lives, though their allies within the state and federal government dwindled significantly by the end of the decade.

“The First Vote,” drawn by A.R. Waud. Harper’s Weekly, November 16, 1867.
Courtesy Library of Congress.

The existing records do not indicate that Gainey’s investigation led to any legal action against Watson’s attackers. During its brief existence, Mississippi’s Secret Service stretched itself thin attempting to investigate Klan attacks throughout the state, and it seemingly lacked sufficient resources to curtail the violence in a meaningful way. With a staff of only seven detectives, the agency had little hope of combatting the vigilantes when many whites either supported or tolerated them.[8] In fact, Gainey observed during his mission, “Almost every young man in the county is a member of the organization or in sympathy with those who are in it.” This case shows that while Alcorn’s Secret Service could identify and expose those responsible for Klan violence, their ability to protect Mississippi’s Black communities proved negligible.

Alcorn’s hope of defeating the Klan with his Secret Service Bureau ultimately failed to gain an upper hand on the pervasive white terrorism throughout the state. As Reconstruction fell apart in the mid-1870s, the Democratic Party regained control of the Mississippi government, curtailed the political rights of African Americans, and ushered in the Jim Crow era by the end of the century. Beyond a dramatic story, Gainey’s letter offers insight into that the brief period during Reconstruction when the state government had the opportunity to protect the rights and the lives of African Americans. But that would have required more than “cautious and irresolute” action from leaders like Alcorn to be successful and permanent.[9]

Lucas Somers is Assistant Professor of History at Lindsey Wilson College. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi in May 2022. His dissertation is entitled Embattled Learning: Education and Emancipation in the Post-Civil War Upper South. In 2018, Lucas served as a Graduate Research Associate for the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition and was a research assistant for the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project in the summers of 2020 and 2021. He also served as USM’s McCain Graduate Fellow in 2021-2022.

[1] Editorial, The Oxford Falcon, July 23, 1870.

[2] “Officials for Lafayette County,” The Oxford Falcon, June 26, 1869; “Blood Money. Clayton’s Thieves and Murderers Receiving the Reward of Their Infamy. A Nice Party to Control the Affairs of a County,” The Oxford Falcon, November 27, 1869.

[3] CWRGM has not been able to find a Sheriff Mahon in Lafayette County between 1850-1870.

[4] According to a later account of one of the Lafayette County Klansmen, B. F. Goolsby, Mat Goolsby’s father, served as the Grand Cyclops of that den of the Klan, Julia Kendel, “Reconstruction in Lafayette County,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 13 (1913), 240-241.

[5] 1870 United States Federal Census [database online], (Provo, Utah: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009).

[6] “The Shooting Affair at Near Mrs. Simmons’,” The Oxford Falcon, April 2, 1870.

[7] Kendel, “Reconstruction,” 240-241.

[8] William T. Blain, “Challenge to the Lawless: The Mississippi Secret Service, 1870-1871,” The Mississippi Quarterly 3, no. 2 (Spring 1978), 231.

[9] Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 35.

Gov. Alcorn’s Secret Service Infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan – Part 1

May 20, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By Lucas Somers, Ph.D. , Asst. Prof. of History, Lindsey Wilson College

Every once in a while, when reading through the letters written to U.S. governors in the nineteenth century, you will find a story that nearly jumps off the weathered pages. A story that draws you in all on its own and spurs you to learn more about it. Even in its nascent phase, the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM) project has been fortunate to discover several such stories, not the least of which is the J. J. Gainey letter from July 30, 1870.

Gainey’s letter is quite relevant in the year 2022, when movements for racial justice have regained momentum and when true crime podcasts and documentaries are as popular as ever. His letter can help us observe what is arguably one of the most consequential periods in U.S. history. Historians generally agree that understanding the era of Reconstruction is crucial to our ability to grapple with this country’s complex and present-day issues with race. And my personal favorite aspect of CWRGM is that the collection allows us to better understand the long-term effects of emancipation and Reconstruction in Mississippi.

The events depicted in this document occurred five years after the Civil War ended. During that period, Mississippi experienced significant and potentially revolutionary change. The state witnessed the rise of notorious Black Codes under Presidential Reconstruction that attempted to revert African Americans to a status resembling enslavement. By 1868, the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress had taken control of the Mississippi through the military administration of Adelbert Ames. As a result of this second phase known as Radical Reconstruction, the state witnessed sweeping attacks on the Black Codes, and the formerly enslaved population gained civil and political rights enforced by federal troops in the Fourth Military District. This progress came about largely through the ratification of amendments to the U.S. Constitution that provided an opportunity, a hope, for true racial equality for the first time in American history. Radical Reconstruction, therefore, represented a legitimate opportunity for lasting change in the South within only a few years of slavery’s demise.

 

James D. Lynch, first African American Secretary of State of Mississippi. This is a detail from the Lynch monument in Greenwood Cemetery, Jackson, Mississippi. Courtesy WikiCommons.

Evidence of this rapid progress is demonstrated by the number of African Americans who served in political offices at local, state, and national levels. For example, in 1869, Mississippi elected James D. Lynch Secretary of State, making him the first African American to hold a statewide office. But these advances inspired a backlash from white paramilitary groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, that attacked and threatened formerly enslaved people and their allies. This violent resistance intended to “redeem” the South by reversing all traces of racial equality and reasserting white supremacy.

By the time Mississippi native James Lusk Alcorn became the first elected Republican Governor in Mississippi in March 1870, white vigilante violence had become a serious threat to the Black constituents upon whom his election relied. To address this, Alcorn organized a small group of detectives known as the Mississippi Secret Service Bureau, appointed a man named Lewis M. Hall to serve as its leader, and tasked them with investigating the KKK’s terror campaign throughout the state. Concurrently, the federal government began enacting its own plans for combatting white violence throughout the South with the Enforcement Acts.

 

Mississippi Governor James Lusk Alcorn. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04713. 

Alcorn was a former Unionist slaveholder who had opposed session, though once the war began, he served as a brigadier general of state militia forces. In postwar Mississippi, Alcorn was viewed as a moderate Republican who advocated for African-American civil rights, including suffrage and the right to serve on juries. When his resistance to the Klan concerned more conservative whites, who tolerated brutal racial violence if it re-established their authority, Alcorn insisted that the investigations were meant to prevent further federal involvement in Mississippi.[1] Ultimately, Alcorn’s efforts to counter the KKK amounted to what one historian called a “cautious and irresolute response.”[2]

The author of this letter, a man named John J. Gainey, had begun working for the Mississippi Secret Service by the summer of 1870. His mission was to determine the identities of the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for a series of violent attacks against African Americans in Lafayette County. Prior to this, Gainey, a twenty-two-year-old native of Cork, Ireland, had worked as a tobacconist in St. Louis, Missouri until he enlisted in the U.S. Army in October 1866. He served in the military for three years, including a stint in the Fourth Military District.[3] Just before joining the Secret Service, Gainey had worked for a short time as the deputy sheriff of Sunflower County, Mississippi. In January 1870, Gainey, accompanied by a group of federal soldiers, attempted to arrest Tully S. Gibson, a former Confederate soldier. After a firefight that resulted in Gibson’s death, conservative newspapers throughout the state branded Gainey a “murderer” and “a Radical carpet-bagger.”[4] Despite this reputation among native Mississippians, Gainey still successfully passed himself off as a Klan sympathizer only a few months later.

The letter featured here provides a gripping narrative of Gainey’s undercover operation as he attempted to carry out Alcorn’s policy of ending the white terrorism in his state. Though Gainey achieved all his objectives in Lafayette County, the overall impact of that mission in protecting the hard-fought civil rights for Black Mississippians ultimately proved negligible. In part 2 of this blog post, we will examine Gainey’s mission itself and try to understand why local African Americans remained vulnerable to white violence despite his success.

 

Lucas Somers is Assistant Professor of History at Lindsey Wilson College. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Southern Mississippi in May 2022. His dissertation is entitled Embattled Learning: Education and Emancipation in the Post-Civil War Upper South. In 2018, Lucas served as a Graduate Research Associate for the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition and was a research assistant for the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project in the summers of 2020 and 2021. He also served as USM’s McCain Graduate Fellow in 2021-2022.

[1] “Letter from Hon. J. L. Alcorn,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 30, 1872.

[2] Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 35.

[3] Registers of Enlistments in the United States Army, compiled 1798 – 1914, NARA RG 94, Microfilm Series M233, Roll 31.

[4] William T. Blain, “Challenge to the Lawless: The Mississippi Secret Service, 1870-1871,” The Mississippi Quarterly 3, no. 2 (Spring 1978), 232; Editorial, The Clarion-Ledger, February 3, 1870.

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