True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Clayton J. Butler (review)

Abstract

Harper and author and teacher Edmondia Goodelle Highgate in Syracuse in 1864, male leaders downplayed their participation; Gardner flips the script by piecing together their likely remarks from their biographies and newspaper accounts of speeches they gave elsewhere. Even when they did not speak, women were not passive. In the published minutes, Erica L. Ball reads the regular offering of “thanks” to the ladies in attendance for their patriotism, influence, and “exertion” as indicative of “call-and-response” rituals that allowed women to be broadly engaged (155, 162). Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux imagine how the presence of female attendees at an 1883 convention in Austin changed the nature of a debate about how to respond to Texas’ anti-miscegenation law. Among the collection’s strongest essays is Psyche Williams-Forson’s, which brings to life the world of urban boardinghouses where delegates stayed carried on the conversations and debates begun in the meeting halls. Black women who ran boardinghouses were nineteenth-century American salonnières; they hosted convention leaders and likely shaped the nature of the debates that transpired in their homes and in the meeting halls. To find the records of the political work of feeding and sheltering convention attendees, Williams-Forson has identified ads female boardinghouse keepers placed in the papers. These sources fall outside of the CCP archive, but the work they document places women at the center of the history this collection seeks to highlight. Not all of the essays are aimed at recovering Black women’s intellectual and organizational labor, but they nonetheless hint at some of CCP collection’s stillas-yet-fully-realized potential. The section of Derick Spires’s essay that considers Julia Garnet’s influence over her husband, William Henry Garnet’s 1843 “Address to the Slaves,” opens the possibility to explore the editorial work of other activist-wives. Jim Casey’s relationship-mapping produces a host of new questions about overlapping or serial conference attendance and about how conventions responded to events on the ground. Surely, many more questions will arise as the CCP collection continues to grow and as scholars continue to mine it for patterns or anomalies that can help to bring this history of Black activism to life. Judith Giesberg Villanova University