Looking Beyond the Letters

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

Tag: Mississippi

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and experiences that researchers may not think to use when searching or terms that are now considered offensive and/or outdated.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.

“Armchair Generals” and Concerned Citizens: Public Advice about Defending the Mississippi River, Part III

September 23, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By: Michael Singleton, former CWRGM Assistant Editor

            In the last two posts, we examined some of the more exceptional documents in the CWRGM collection that featured civilian suggestions to Governor John J. Pettus about defending Mississippi’s waterways, namely the Mississippi River. These proposals ranged from more conventional plans for fixed fortifications to—as we looked at last time—a unique plan for an ironclad warship with a rapid-fire battering ram. Today’s post continues the theme from that second article as it details perhaps the most unconventional of all the proposals: a plan for a manned, steam-powered submarine designed to attack Federal ships on the state’s rivers and in the ocean.

The advent of submarine warfare is near the top of the list of important technological innovations brought about by the American Civil War. The successful (albeit suicidal) attack by the submarine CSS Hunley on a Federal warship in Charleston Harbor in February 1864 heralded a new age of naval warfare that forced commanders to consider threats from below the waves, not just on the surface. When Thomas P. Hall of De Soto Parish, Louisiana, forwarded Governor Pettus a plan for a submarine in December 1862, however, that revolutionary change was by no means certain.[1] Hall’s letter contained a design by a local acquaintance, Charles J. Provost, that Hall felt deserved the Governor’s attention because of its potential to “prove a most efficient weapon for driving the enemy out of all our rivers and away from our harbors & seacoast.” According to Hall, Provost’s plan had been examined and approved by “some of our ablest engineers” in Louisiana and recommended that the Governor seek further confirmation of its potential from other experts.

Figure 1. Charles Post’s schematic drawing of his submarine design. Note the conning tower, rotating mechanism, and “arm holes.” Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

Provost’s plan was complex. It called for a vessel built around a boiler taken from a steamboat with a screw attached to a propeller as the primary means of propulsion. A “driving wheel” with “long hands extending forward having knobs to them” would allow the crew to crank the wheel and move the boat forward and backward. Ropes extending from the rudder would allow a crewmember in the bow to steer the vessel as necessary. Ballast meant to keep the submarine horizontal and aid in depth changes would be “distributed uniformly” along its length. Air for the crew would be pumped in by a tube extending to the boiler from a buoy on the water’s surface. If needed, he proposed that the crew condense “a sufficient quantity of air and take it aboard to last the men several hours.”  Provost did not elaborate on the submarine’s total size, but it can be inferred that by necessity, it would have been large to accommodate room for a steam boiler, crew, and machinery. Likewise, he did not specify the total number of crew the vessel required. Still, at least three men would likely have been needed to, at a minimum, man the “driving wheel,” service the boiler, and control navigation and the vessel’s weaponry.

The design also featured a few curious characteristics of note. Provost planned that a crew member of the crew would navigate the vessel from a revolving, conning tower-like feature extending from the top of the submarine. Made out of “india rubber or water proof leather,” this two-and-a-half-foot extension would contain “a glass in front to look through and two arm holes for the man to run his arms and hands into.” This navigator would also be the individual that manipulated the harpoon and explosive torpedo that extended from the bottom of the boat. This spar would be eight or nine feet long and be capable of swiveling to the left or right as necessary to deliver the torpedo against a Federal ship. According to Provost’s plan, to activate the torpedo, “the force of the boat in motion in the right direction will drive the harpoon in [to the enemy ship], and drive the collar back on the rod so as to disengage the harpoon instantly.” Once attached, the navigator would detach the torpedo manually via a chain and have the submarine back out from the area. In the event of a misfire, Provost detailed a procedure in which the navigator would use his arm-holes to manually mount the torpedo to the side of the enemy ship.

Figure 2. Diagram of the H. L. Hunley. Note the eight crew members driving the propeller shaft, the pilot’s position, and the forward torpedo spar. Image by Matthew Twombly (Smithsonian Magazine).

Despite the apparent thought put into his design, Charles Provost’s plan went unsatisfied—and probably for good reason. Provost’s design was mechanically complicated and would have required a large, and likely unwieldy vessel, considering its use of an adapted steam boiler. Likewise, the navigator’s role in the conning tower with its curious “arm holes” appears out of proportion to the size of the rest of the submarine and likely not functionally possible. The manipulation and activation of the spar torpedo also were overly intricate and not likely to be successful given its location on the boat’s underside. Finally, little thought seems to have been given about how the boiler smoke would be expended during operation.

By contrast, the designers of the H. L. Hunley employed a more straightforward design that favored manpower over complex engines. In their experiments at Mobile, Alabama, in 1862 and 1863, the Hunley’s inventors tested electric motors and a steam engine but found them both unworkable as a means of propulsion. They instead determined to use a screw cranked by eight crew members to turn the propeller and push the boat. Like Provost’s plan, the Hunley featured a two-foot-tall conning tower, but it did not rotate nor have “arm holes.” Instead, the pilot steered the boat with a forward wheel and manipulated the spar torpedo with wires (mounted to the submarine’s bow rather than the underside). No mechanism was used to supply air as the crew breathed what was contained in the ship after its twin hatches were closed.[2] This simpler design—while undoubtedly taxing for its crew—allowed it to function in a realistic manner not likely possible with Provost’s plan.

All told, Charles Provost’s submarine plan can be added to the list of the other plans that, while sincerely submitted, were disregarded by Pettus and other Confederate authorities. Nevertheless, together they build a picture of several industrious Southern civilians who sought to employ tactical and technical ingenuity to aid the Confederate war effort. Like the higher-level discussions of strategy and military operations contained in the documents of the CWRGM collection, theirs is also a part of the larger story of the American Civil War that deserves to be told. I hope you have enjoyed learning about them as much as I have and would encourage you to dig further into the collection to find other unique stores and voices from the past. Enjoy! 

Michael Singleton was the CWRGM Assistant Editor from 2021-2022. He earned his M.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in August 2022 and his B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute in 2013. While a student at USM, Michael served as a Public History Intern on the CWRGM project in the summer of 2021 and a graduate Teaching Assistant from 2020-2021. He also served as an active-duty Infantry officer in the U.S. Army from 2013 to 2020. 

[1] By December 1862, experiments with submarine prototypes were ongoing within the Confederacy but still not yet completed. The first tests occurred in New Orleans, LA, in the spring of 1862 when a group of inventors built the Pioneer, a 30 ft. long, cigar shaped, submarine. It suffered from navigational and steering issues, but demonstrated the feasibility of underwater movement. It was scuttled when Federal forces seized New Orleans that April. Trials resumed in Mobile, AL, some months later when the same inventors built a second prototype, The American Diver. This boat was 36 ft. long and used a propeller shaft cranked by its four-man crew.  The Diver sank during sea trials in Mobile Bay in January 1863. The lessons learned from these two ventures would serve as the basis for their third (and ultimately successful) attempt, the H. L. Hunley in 1863 and 1864. See, Mark K. Ragan, Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons of the Civil War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015) 10-11, 25-27.

[2] Ragan, Confederate Saboteurs, 29-30.

“Armchair Generals” and Concerned Citizens: Public Advice about Defending the Mississippi River, Part II

August 13, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By: Michael Singleton, Former CWRGM Assistant Editor

            In the last post, I relayed several of the unique documents from the CWRGM collection that featured proposals sent by civilians to Mississippi Governor John Pettus on how best to fortify and defend the Mississippi River. While notable for their detail and designs, those propositions primarily focused on conventional techniques like land-based fortifications and a network of river obstructions. Today’s post highlights a series of letters from 1862 that offered a plan for an unconventional naval weapon that the author believed would neutralize the power of the United States Navy. Like the previous documents, these proposals contain a fascinating drawing accompanying the written proposal. Similarly, it also appears to have gone unimplemented at the state and national levels for untold reasons. Regardless, these documents contain a range of innovative, technical, and scientific thinking that—even if disregarded by government authorities— further demonstrate the extent to which some enterprising civilians sought to support and influence the Confederate war effort with their own advice and insight.

                On July 29, 1862, William R. Scott of Wilmington, North Carolina, sent a letter to Governor Pettus detailing his plans for a “Steam Battering Ram” that he felt would allow the Confederate Navy to “Destroy the Federal Navy that is in the Miss River” and thus “win and Rule their own rights.” Scott’s proposal envisioned an ironclad ship adapted from the hull and boilers of an existing steamboat. The crux of his design was a steam-powered, multi-use battering ram that he asserted could deliver repeated blows below the waterline on an enemy ship. Scott suggested that the state of Mississippi complete the construction at the shipyard on the Yazoo River and likened its armored design to that of the famed CSS Arkansas that had only weeks before been completed.[1] In total, Scott’s first letter was long on rhetoric and short on technical details. He provided no specifics on how the ram would operate, nor details on its prospective dimensions, crew, armament, or necessary construction material. In this initial proposition, all Scott provided was his brief proposal, a rough sketch (that is missing), and an assessment conducted by officials from the Confederate Navy Department that endorsed his design. 

Figure 1. The CSS Arkansas under construction on the Yazoo River, 1862. Image courtesy of Wikicommons.

           It is clear that Pettus did not answer Scott’s initial letter because, in December 1862, he again petitioned the Governor and stated that “not having heard from you concerning it” he would “take the liberty to send you another sketch.” Scott’s second letter is of greater significance as he included a detailed sketch of the boat and an eight-page copy of the meeting minutes from a sub-commission of the South Carolina government that inspected and approved the plans. Scott’s design (Fig. 2) shows a double-acting steam engine mounted towards the boat’s bow that would operate a “battering ram” protruding below the waterline. He asserted that this weapon could be “driven with a force of from one hundred to six hundred tons depending on the size of the engine” and could do so against an enemy ship at a rapid pace of up to twenty blows per minute.

Figure 2. William Scott’s design for his ironclad with its steam-powered battering ram. At top is a endview of the ship while the middle and bottom views are a top and side view respectively. Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

In essence, Scott envisioned a vessel that would, like a boxer, close with a Federal ship and deliver repeated body blows until its hull was breached or the craft fled. Such a design differed widely from the operation of conventional naval rams like the CSS Virginia and the CSS Tennessee, which both depended on the force of the ship’s momentum to deliver a blow and relied on mounted artillery for defense and offensive capabilities.[2] Contrarily, Scott’s ship would be purely offensive in nature as it evidently (according to the basic design) featured no other form of armament beyond the steam ram. This decision would mean that the ship would have relied solely on the reliability of its steam engines to generate sufficient speed and its ability to get close to enemy ships to be effective. The design further meant that the ship would have no other defensive capabilities than its ability to close with and batter enemy vessels. 

Nevertheless, more than any other innovative proposal in the CWRGM collection, Scott’s design appears to have come the closest to fulfillment. This fact is evident from the South Carolina commission report, which included copies of correspondence between Scott and numerous high-level Confederate officials who each expressed support for his design. For example, Confederate Lieutenant General P. G. T. Beauregard endorsed the plan in October 1862 by stating that he thought “favorably of the proposed battering Ram of Mr. W. R. Scott” because it could “continue the battering process without having to back for a new momentum.” Moreover, the South Carolina commission unanimously approved the plan and recommended its immediate implementation, while some Confederate Naval Department officials like its Chief Engineer William P. Williamson likewise endorsed the proposal and recommended it for action. Finally, Scott’s plan even reached the desk of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in September 1862, whose secretary (and son of Robert E. Lee) Colonel George Washington Custis Lee promised to refer the plan to the Secretary of the Navy, Stephen F. Mallory.

Figure 3. The CSS Manassas, the only Confederate ironclad to operate as a singular ram. It served briefly as it suffered damage and was abandoned in an engagement near New Orleans, LA, in September 1861. Image courtesy of Wikicommons.

Likely, Scott’s plan went no further than Mallory’s (or Pettus’) desk, for no such ironclad was ever constructed in total in Mississippi or elsewhere. This is possibly because of the failure of the singular ram CSS Manassas in combat in 1861 or that it violated Mallory’s policy to both offensive and defensively capable ironclads.[3]  However, it is possible that Scott’s plan did influence the construction of the CSS Charleston, which was constructed by the state of South Carolina in the fall of 1862 and that interestingly featured a unique iron ram protruding at length from its bow.[4] This is a feature not seen any other Confederate ironclads and, given the South Carolina commission’s enthusiasm and recommendation for his proposal, could mean that they incorporated the spirit of Scott’s design rather than it completely. In any event, despite his evident passion and persistence, William Scott’s idea went unfulfilled as it applied to the state of Mississippi as Pettus, and local Confederates forged ahead with more conventional plans on the Mississippi River. In a third and final post, we will move below the waves to detail another unconventional proposal broached to Governor Pettus about thwarting the Federal Navy along the Mississippi River. Stay tuned!

Michael Singleton was the CWRGM Assistant Editor from 2021-2022. He earned his M.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in August 2022 and his B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute in 2013. While a student at USM, Michael served as a Public History intern on the CWRGM project in the summer of 2021 and a graduate teaching assistant from 2020-2021. He also served as an active duty Infantry officer in the U.S. Army from 2013 to 2020.

[1] The CSS Arkansas was a large ironclad completed at a shipyard located on the Yazoo River in Mississippi in the mid-summer of 1862. It featured railroad iron for armor and two large (but unreliable) steam engines for propulsion. It left the shipyard on July 14, 1862 to engage Federal ships on the Mississippi River. In a series of engagements, it ran the Federal fleet above Vicksburg and remained near that city until it travelled south to participate in a Confederate offensive to retake Baton Rouge, LA. In that action, it suffered debilitating engine trouble and was abandoned and scuttled under fire by its crew. See, Saxon Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2018), 68-81.

[2] Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion, 7, 230.

[3] Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion, 8, 33, 37, 84.

[4] Bisbee, Engines of Rebellion, 132-133.

“Armchair Generals” and Concerned Citizens: Public Advice about Defending the Mississippi River, Part I

July 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

By: Michael Singleton, former CWRGM Assistant Editor

            As should be clear to anyone who has explored the documents in the CWRGM collection, nineteenth-century individuals wrote to their governors about virtually everything. Whether they were requests for criminal pardons, exemptions from military service, applications for employment, or appeals for mediation, white Mississippians had few qualms about penning a letter to their state executives. It shouldn’t be surprising then that this trend also carried over to the military sphere. Throughout the Civil War, a handful of Mississippi civilians took it on themselves to submit proposals to their Governors on how best to fight the Federal army and navy. In many of these cases, recommendations revolved around defending Mississippi’s many waterways, especially the Mississippi River. While small in number, these letters comprise some of the collection’s most interesting and visually entertaining documents because they often include detailed drawings and descriptions of the author’s plans. Military history buffs will especially enjoy the documents that relay designs for new military equipment meant to revolutionize the Confederate war effort.

             A series of letters from an Edward Rew in Sageville, Mississippi, are perhaps the two best examples of this phenomenon. Before the war, Rew was a moderately successful carpenter turned planter in Lauderdale County with no evident engineering or military experience.[1] Nevertheless, in August 1861, he wrote Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus a lengthy plan to “aid in the defences of the Mississippi River,” which he felt, if implemented, would make “an effectual barrier to the enemy should they attempt to send a fleet down said river at this or any future time during the present war.” Accompanying Rew’s letter is a detailed drawing depicting the various elements of his defensive plan.

Figure1. Edward Rew’s diagram depicts his plan to obstruct the Mississippi River. Note the chain, network of boats, and the artillery batteries flanking the obstacle on both riverbanks. Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

Rew proposed that the state build a large iron chain to stretch across the Mississippi River. This obstacle would be secured at both ends by timer pilings driven into the riverbank, while a series of wooden boats with anchors would be scattered along the chain to hold it in place. He also proposed that Confederates place other obstructions upstream of the chain “so as to deaden the headway” of boat traffic and allow fortified artillery batteries on both riverbanks to bombard and sink any Federal ships. At his own admission, Rew submitted a similar—albeit less-detailed—plan to then Confederate Secretary of War Leroy Walker to possibly attract his attention.

It is unclear how (or even if) Governor Pettus responded to Rew’s first suggestion, but it is fair to think that the governor likely shelved the idea and moved on to more practical concerns. Nevertheless, six months later, in February 1862, Rew resubmitted his plan to Pettus—this time apparently at the governor’s request. In this letter, Rew referenced the need to save the Confederacy from “any more Ft. Henrys and Donnalsons,” so it is possible that those twin defeats only weeks before sparked a renewed desire to improve Confederate defenses along the Mississippi. Rew’s second proposal differed little from his first, though he did add the possibility of employing “submarine batteries” to supplement the chain obstacle. Although Rew admitted that such devices “would hardly be necessary,” his reference to underwater mines alluded to the tactics Confederates would employ in great numbers later in the war. His dismissal of these mines—while later proven to be misguided—nonetheless demonstrated a striking familiarity with up-and-coming military technology for an untrained civilian.

Figure2. Edward Rew’s second diagram from February 26, 1862 depicts his plan to save the Confederacy from “any more Ft. Henrys and Donnalsons.” Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

In July 1862, just six months after Rew’s letters, R. P. Guyard of Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, wrote Governor Pettus to provide “some suggestions that can permanently secure for all time…as much of the Mississippi River as is indispensable to have crossings for travellers, and railroads wherever possible.” Much like Rew, Guyard proposed that state or Confederate authorities obstruct the river by placing obstacles directly in its flow, though he differed on how it should be done. “Chains or cables across the river as a barrier is worse than useless,” he claimed.

Figure 3. R. P. Guyard’s drawing depicting his plan to drive piles into the riverbed. The dash-marks indicate the sharpened piles, while the triangular symbols are the secondary field of wooden piers meant to further obstruct traffic. Courtesy Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi Project. Click on image to view entire document.

Instead, Guyard recommended that teams of workers (likely enslaved people) use a specially-fitted steam engine to drive sharpened poles into the river bottom to create a dense field of obstacles. A secondary group of triangular wooden piers would follow the main obstacle to further slow movement. Like Rew, Guyard envisioned that fortified artillery batteries with sharpshooters would overwatch the obstructions from the riverbank and attack Federal ships as they approached. This construction would occur in multiple locations on the river, with at least one obstacle belt placed north of Memphis, TN. At the same time, another would face southward “below the mouth of Red River” to prevent movement up from newly-occupied New Orleans, LA. No doubt reflecting the acknowledgment that war with the United States could drag on for some time, Guyard proposed that his proposed obstacles would “endure for ages” and permanently block traffic on the Mississippi.

In subsequent months, other civilian writers made similar pitches to Pettus about obstructing the river (such as one anonymous proposal from South Carolina or another from Hazlehurst, Mississippi). In any event, though, no such elaborate obstacles were ever constructed across the waterway in Mississippi. This choice was undoubtedly the result of the sheer impracticality of such an elaborate and challenging venture and because of the significant resources and labor it would have required.[2] Rather, Confederate defenses along the river relied on a combination of massed artillery at fortified points like Port Hudson, Louisiana, or Vicksburg, Mississippi, some minor obstructions, and a small force of naval vessels—including some ironclads. To the extent that Confederates employed techniques like those suggested above, they came at more remote locations along the smaller inland waterways like the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers. There, Confederate troops sunk wooden obstructions and used artillery to overwatch for approaching Federal ships much like in Rew or Guyard’s proposals. They also employed “submarine batteries” or “torpedoes” to great effect—most notably in the sinking of the U.S.S. Cairo in December 1862.[3]

The efficacy of employing more unconventional devices like “torpedoes” was a point made to Governor Pettus in a December 1862 letter by one J. B. Poindexter, an officer in the Third Mississippi Infantry. Poindexter’s forward-looking vision would be matched by other proposals from citizens for more innovative solutions to the threat posed by the United States Navy.

The next blog post in this three-part series will detail these sometimes-radical suggestions. Stay tuned!     

Michael Singleton was the CWRGM Assistant Editor from 2021-2022. He earned his M.A. in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in August 2022 and his B.A. in History from the Virginia Military Institute in 2013. While a student at USM, Michael served as a Public History intern on the CWRGM project in the summer of 2021 and a graduate teaching assistant from 2020-2021. He also served as an active duty Infantry officer in the U.S. Army from 2013 to 2020.

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, 1860 United States Federal Census, “Census Place: Beat 4, Lauderdale, Mississippi, Page: 371,” NARA, Publication M653, Ancestry.com. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/38747111:7667.

[2] It should be noted, however, that Rew and Guyard’s plans had some basis of precedent. When Confederate forces occupied Columbus, Kentucky, in September 1861 they strung a large iron chain across the Mississippi River one mile above town. This chain was suspended below the waterline by a series of boats posted along its length. Numerous artillery batteries overlooked the obstacle from the high bluffs along the river. Reportedly, numerous “torpedoes” were also deployed along the chain and around the area. In almost every sense, this network of obstacles matched Edward Rew’s proposal to Governor Pettus in August 1861. See O.R. ser. I, vol. 7, pp. 436, 534; “Columbus-Belmont State Park—Historic Pocket Brochure Text,” Kentucky Department of Parks, https://parks.ky.gov/sites/default/files/listing_documents/bd5d0c09888351da895977a12981568a_Col-Belmontpcktbrochure.pdf.

[3] Neil Chatelain, Defending the Arteries of Rebellion: Confederate Naval Operations in the Mississippi River Valley, 1861-1865 (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2020) 205-208, 246-250.

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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