20150604 - RNAS Conference Brainstorm

I’ve been doing research for and thinking about a conference paper that I’ll be delivering at the Rethinking North American Sovereignty conference in Banff, Canada this summer. This is an attempt to sum up my thinking before I have to step away from the paper for about ten days.

Between submitting the proposal for this conference and now, my research took a significant turn towards the very different subject of Henrietta Wood, which I summarized in my 20150508 - Stephanie Camp Conference paper. So now I’m having to go back to older research and material and pick up some strands of thought that I haven’t picked up in a while.

My abstract is here:

For generations of historians, the most important fact about the Confederacy’s experiment in state-building has been that it failed. But the Confederacy’s failure—the way its story ended—has also created a tendency to see its wartime policies primarily in terms of how they contributed to Confederate defeat. Prevailing historiographical trends highlight how state experiments such as slave impressment, draft exemption details, commodity rationing, industrial penitentiaries, and cotton-buying programs failed to meet homefront needs, exposed internal social tensions, revealed contradictions at the heart of Confederate ideology, and thus hastened the state’s collapse.

Focusing particularly on the wartime governments of the Trans-Mississippi states of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, whose circumstances were often quite unique due to their geographical proximity to the Confederacy’s western frontier and the Mexican border, my paper asks a different question: not how did such wartime measures contribute to Confederate failure, but what did individual white Southerners *learn* from such experiments that shaped their responses to the postwar order?  How and to what extent did policies such as slave impressment and convict labor set legal precedents for postwar labor regimes or create political and personal networks that facilitated those regimes?

Crucial to this history is the unique, under-appreciated status of the Trans-Mississippi South as a de facto state of its own during the Civil War. In close contact with allies in the pro-French regime in Mexico on the one hand and, by 1863 isolated from the central Confederate government in Richmond on the other, Confederates west of the Mississippi made their own singular experiments in securing white supremacy without a strong government defending racial slavery. By looking beyond the failure of these policies to save the Confederacy, I argue that we can better see what these policies did succeed in doing and how they contributed to the rapid retrenchment of white power in the Reconstruction South.

This paper is really a follow-up to a comment that I received at the OAH from Yael Sternhell last year on my paper about refugeed slaves. Her question, at least as I remember it, was about what Southern states learned from policies adopted during the Civil War.

One reason I couldn’t quite answer that question at the time, I realized, is because I didn’t know enough about what Confederate states qua states did, particularly in the Trans-Mississippi region that I was interested in because of my research on Refugeed Slaves. Since then I’ve come to think that questions about state policies like Confederate Slave Impressment have too often been narrowly framed as pertaining to the question of “why the South lost” or “why the North won.” This is not universally true, of course, but even studies that have taken a close second look at state policies, such as martinez2013, tend to position themselves within historiographical debates about Richmond-state relations (which are themselves subsets of the debate over why the Confederacy failed). One of the best works on the Trans-Mississippi homefront, kerby1972, similarly is most interested in what state policies failed to do (supply civilian needs, win the war, etc.) and thus shows less interest in what state policies did do, as well as their longer range effects.

The cost of only thinking about Confederate state policy in terms of “failure” is that (a) it usually considers these policies as wartime measures, when many of them had longer antecedents in antebellum Southern state building; and (b) it prevents us from seeing how policies adopted by Confederate states lived on (either as policies, or through their effects) into the Reconstruction period.

I originally thought I was going to write mostly about impressment for this paper, but now think that I’m going to circle back to one of my initial interests when I began research on Refugees to Texas, which was the evidence that many refugees were hiring out slaves to manufacturing interests like Salt Works. I’ve done quite a bit of research on how Pendleton Murrah and the Texas Military Board encouraged such manufactures through incentives like Land Grants provided for by the Texas Incorporation Acts, and though this was not unique to the Trans-Mississippi, their efforts were uniquely aided by proximity to the Mexican border, new sources of labor in the form of Refugeed Slaves and distance from the front.

I’m particularly interested now in tracing out the language that Confederate officials in Texas used to legitimate policies for cotton purchasing and the introduction of machinery into the state, as well as the effects of such policies in individual cases like the Brazos Manufacturing Company or the Chappell Hill Manufacturing Company.

When I return to this, I want to go back to a couple of secondary works that could serve as models for thinking about these things: morgan2005, downs2011, and quintana2015. Need to decide, too, whether to follow up on the other state-building literature that Quintana cites. Quintana in particular has gotten me thinking about the etiology of bureaucracies like the Military Board and the Board of Public Labor, as well as the “public interest” and “liberal policy” language used in the contracts made with manufacturing companies and in the language of Murrah and other Texas governors and legislators. (Which reminds me I need to look at the Senate and House journals for Texas during the war.)

I also want to think more about one interesting individual case that I might use to show the important of paying attention to what states were doing. A. J. Ward began as an anti-black “free labor” trade activist in Arkansas, leased the penitentiary there during the war to make cotton goods, refugeed enslaved people to Texas in 1863, then joined with some locals to form a manufacturing company designed to reap benefits from the state incentive system.

He appears to have sold cotton to help finance this effort, and turned these wartime activities into a profitable career as a cotton and wool commissioning agent in Galveston with close ties to the state government. Those ties enabled him to win the first lease of the Huntsville State Penitentiary, where he presided over the beginnings of convict leasing. The state’s interest in using the penitentiary to manufacture goods really accelerated during the war and lived beyond it.¹ But the ties between the war and Ward’s exploits aren’t easy to see if the only questions we are asking are: how much cotton were homefront industrialists making? was it “enough”? did it create conflict with the Confederate government in Richmond? did it contribute to the Confederacy’s defeat?

Just yesterday I also stumbled across some interesting post-war cases involving companies that were attempting to claim the Land Grants promised by the Texas Incorporation Acts. Ward’s company (under different ownership) was one of them. The arguments in the cases centered on questions of sovereignty, and whether or not the land bounties were “debts” incurred by Texas when it was a “so-called state”—debts repudiated by the constitutions of 1866 and 1872. See especially McLeary v. Dawson. These cases are interesting from a legal perspective, but also interesting in that they indicate companies were continuing to (attempt to) benefit from Confederate state policies long after the war. Companies like the Houston and Texas Central Railroad that were able to expand operations during the war also continued to benefit from those encouragements (and the use of enslaved labor afforded to them) after the war.

Clearly still a lot of winnowing and thinking to do, but I think I’m going to have enough to suggest, at the very least, why it is worth continuing to follow downs2011 and others in moving “beyond failure” as a framing question for thinking about Confederate state policy.

To anyone who’s made it this far, your questions and suggestions are welcome; just click on the “discuss” tab at the top of the page to make a comment—no wiki account needed.