Forgetting and the Forgotten: A Thousand Years of Contested Histories in the Heartland

Abstract

Michael Batinski has written a double-barreled historiography of Jackson County, Illinois, which pairs an analysis of the traditional male and white-centric narrative with a “from the bottom up” narrative. This makes it a compelling exploration of the problems of local history. Forgetting and the Forgotten presents a historiography of a Jeffersonian tale of progress by white folk who conquered and cultivated the wilderness to create a yeoman farmer democracy. The texts of these tales are mostly found in what Batinski describes as “gilt-covered histories found on parlor tables.” Those accounts are contested by his historiography of inclusion. In these accounts, Batinski voices the forgotten and suppressed stories of the twelfth- to fifteenth-century Mississippian people and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Algonquian-speaking people. He writes of those who failed in their settlement efforts and moved on; of those People of Color who drifted into the county as laborers, some of whom were used up; and of those European immigrants who came in to mine coal and build railroads for national corporations. This is not so much a history of Jackson County as it is an examination of the history of Jackson County as a lesson on the uses and abuses of the past.Forgetting and the Forgotten opens with an elegiac retelling of Mississippian cosmology, written from a close reading of stories of origin collected by anthropologists. These are tied to the numerous traces these Mississippians left on the landscape as rock glyphs, earthen monuments, and objects of daily use and ceremony. The visible heritage on the land was turned against the Indigenous peoples whom the white settlers met. Native Americans were accused of being the vicious and debauched people who destroyed the great mound builder civilization. In a transitional chapter, “To Square the Circle,” Batinski shows how understanding of the land was changed from a place of memories that contained ancient stories of origin and place, to the survey grid laid over the Old Northwest by the Ordinance of 1787. The grid was the critical tool of organizing a European system of title, record, and ownership. The implementation of the grid “extinguished” native peoples’ claims.The white settlers recounted their stories of hard work and perseverance. These scripted accounts were based upon widely observed conventions of the meaning of the past and its value. Batinski does a good job of assessing the nature of these nineteenth-century county histories that were commercial enterprises with pro-forma structure and content. These keepers of the past recorded the stories of those who could pay to be included. As a counterpoint, Batinski introduces the stories that were left out, such as the wide resistance in Jackson County to the Civil War. The traditional narratives highlighted General John A. Logan, the Democratic congressman (and former state legislator who had worked to prevent Black migration into Illinois) who became a Union general. Those narratives ignored high desertion rates and the “underground militia” that supported the Southern cause. The post–Civil War chapter reviews the violence directed against the growing African American community, including in a lynching on the banks of the Big Muddy River in 1874. The prime instigator was “Granny Patchett.” The lives of those Euro-Americans who were left out are introduced in this chapter as well. The archives of the Illinois Central Railroad (ICRR) provided a solid resource for this local study. Batinski found the story of Rosario Panebiango, an immigrant ICRR section gang worker who baked bread in homemade trackside earthen ovens. Panebiango worked through the town, rather than in the town. He was badly injured in an avoidable accident, the fate of hundreds of people along the ICCR's “Main Line of Mid-America.”The book closes with a well-developed account of African Americans in Carbondale. These families came to Carbondale as strike breakers, as industrial workers for a railroad tie factory whose pollution was toxic. These new families lived near the tie factory in a segregated neighborhood and their children attended substandard segregated schools. Southern Illinois University in Carbondale features as the destination of newly enrolled World War II veterans helped by the GI Bill. Black students such as Warren St. James sought equal rights after their service in the battle against fascism in a too long-forgotten effort to integrate local restaurants, schools and jobs.Batinski plainly states his goal: “I hope this project will assist readers who inquire into their own local pasts.” He has succeeded in his project. Forgetting and the Forgotten would have been strengthened with the inclusion of deeper accounts of women in Jackson County. These accounts might be found in such areas as Christian charitable work, Civil War relief activities, and temperance and suffrage work. As Batinski demonstrates, those involved in local history would do well to read and learn from it. His lessons are applicable throughout our profession. Libraries with Illinois collections should add this to their shelves. The history of African Americans in Jackson County alone makes it an important resource. General readers of Illinois history will enjoy the book for its clarity of purpose and well-selected narrative threads.