Civil War and Reconstruction

I’m drawn to the Civil War and Reconstruction because I’m interested in how ordinary people experience government. The Civil War was fought over the question of federal power, and the fighting of the war, as well as the Reconstruction that followed, caused the federal government to grow in size and to take on new functions. I am currently at work on a history of how this process unfolded on the South Carolina Sea Islands.  Seized by the Union early in the war, the Sea Islands experienced an occupation unlike any other. The islands' planters all fled, leaving Union troops in possession of the richest cotton land in the south--and nine thousand suddenly masterless slaves. In time, the soldiers and slaves would be joined by businessmen and missionaries, by government officials and abolitionists, and all of these people would have to learn how to live and work alongside one another in new ways. In the process, even the most conservative among them were persuaded that slavery should be abolished and that political and economic equality should be secured. But as it became clear that freedom and equality would require the federal government to be involved, even the most radical began to balk. By returning to this episode from the Civil War, The Department of Experiments argues that the US ambivalence about the federal government is bound up with the legacy of slavery.

I'm also interested in how government registers in literature. The writings of Civil War and Reconstruction debate the proper scope and function of government, but they also experiment with new techniques by which government can be depicted. (In the course of thinking about these writings, I published a short essay on the need to depict the federal government properly, as well as a longer essay on the rise of bureaucracy and bureaucratic writing during the Civil War and another on the Freedmen’s Bureau, the freedmen’s schools, and the development of the US welfare state). More recently, I’ve become interested in regions that were under direct federal rule: not only the southern states during Reconstruction, but also the western territories prior to statehood, and Washington, DC from the founding to the present day. While most people experience the federal government as remote and abstract, people in these regions experienced it with rare immediacy and the writings about these regions are unusually rich in their depictions. I look forward to writing a scholarly monograph, entitled The Southern, The Western, and Washington, DC, which finds in regional writings the origins of our current thinking about the federal government.