Civil War in the Delta: Environment, Race, and the 1863 Helena Campaign

“Civil War in the Delta” describes how the American Civil War came to Helena, Arkansas, and its Phillips County environs, and how its people—black and white, male and female, rich and poor, free and enslaved, soldier and civilian—lived that conflict from the spring of 1861 to the summer of 1863, when Union soldiers repelled a Confederate assault on the town. Scholars have been writing Civil War community studies since the 1960s, but few have investigated communities west of the Mississippi River. Historians also have written widely about Arkansas during the war, but there are no comprehensive studies of a single community in the state. “Civil War in the Delta” fills these voids by detailing the wartime experiences of soldiers and civilians in Helena and its surrounding countryside. “Civil War in the Delta” also describes the 1863 Helena campaign, one of the most significant engagements of the war west of the Mississippi. On July 4, 1863, approximately 7,600 rebels attacked and were repulsed by 4,100 Federals at Helena. The attack was launched to relieve pressure on the besieged Confederate garrison at Vicksburg and secure an important rebel position on the Mississippi River. In the end, it was too little and too late to save Vicksburg, which capitulated on the same morning. However, over 1,800 men were killed, wounded, or captured in the engagement, and its outcome ensured Union control of the Mississippi. The campaign also illustrates the natural environment’s pivotal role in the Civil War. The Confederates believed if they moved against Helena with “celerity and secrecy,” they would easily capture the post. However, the natural environment of the Arkansas Delta—and the Federals’ strategic use of that environment—prevented the Confederates from achieving those ends. Harsh environmental conditions during the rebel approach to Helena in tandem with the Federals’ adaptation of the landscape as a key ally led to Confederate defeat and, by extension, solidified Union control of the Mississippi River and Arkansas

"Sisters of the Capital": White Women in Richmond, Virginia, 1860-1880

This dissertation examines the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on elite, middle-, and working-class white women in Richmond, Virginia. Anne Firer Scott has written that the Civil War was a historical watershed that enabled southern women's movement into broader social, economic, and political roles in southern society. Suzanne Lebsock and George Rable have observed that claims about white Southern women's gains must be measured against the conservatism of Southern society as the patriarchy reasserted itself in the postwar decades. This study addresses this historiographical debate by examining changes in white Richmond women's roles in the workforce, in organizational politics, and the churches. It also analyzes the war's impact on marriage and family relations. Civil War Richmond represented a two-edged sword to its white female population. As the Confederate capital, it provided them with employment opportunities that were impossible before the war began. By 1863, however, Richmond's population more than doubled as southerners emigrated to the city in search of work or to escape Union armies. This expanding population created extreme shortages in food and housing; it also triggered the largest bread riot in the confederacy. With Confederate defeat, many wartime occupations disappeared, although the need for work did not. Widespread postwar poverty led to the emergence of different occupations. Women had formed a number of charitable organizations before the war began. During the war, they developed new associations that stressed women's patriotism rather than their maternity. In the churches, women's wartime work led to the emergence of independent missionary associations that often were in conflict with male-dominated foreign mission boards. Although change occurred, this study concludes that white women's experiences of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Richmond, Virginia, were far more complex than Scott's notion of a historical watershed indicates. The wartime transformation in women's lives was often fraught with irony. Many changes were neither sought nor anticipated by Richmond women. Several came precisely as a direct result of Confederate defeat. Others tended to reinforce patriarchal notions about white women's subordinate status in Southern society

"A LIGHT WHICH REVEALS ITS TRUE MEANING": STATE SUPREME COURTS AND THE CONFEDERATE CONSTITUTION

During the Civil War, Confederate wartime legislation, chiefly conscription, exemption, and impressments statutes, raised fundamental constitutional issues. These actions by the national government became a prolific source of litigation in many southern states. Yet, in the absence of a national Confederate Supreme Court, it fell to state supreme courts and state jurists to resolve these challenges to the national government's exercise of constitutional war powers and to enunciate key constitutional principles and explain the tenets of Confederate political philosophy. As a result, southern state supreme courts became the primary venues in which national constitutional issues were adjudicated. The constitutional purposes and goals of the Confederacy were national- rather than state-oriented and provided for limited but effective national government, a truly federal union in which state and national governments were to both operate effectively and energetically, and within the national government, the powers of the national government were to be separated to promote efficiency and prevent usurpation. In these cases, state supreme courts enunciated key Confederate constitutional doctrines and principles namely, limited government or constitutionalism, federalism, the separation of powers, and national purposes. State jurists established that the Confederate Constitution was a substantive and purposeful constitutive consisting of conservative principles and innovative forms and features. Operating as a de facto supreme court, these state supreme courts considered scores of wartime decisions. Consistently, across jurisdictions, these justices rejected states' rights as the political philosophy of the Confederacy, they upheld the exercise of constitutional Confederate war powers within a carefully articulated doctrine of federalism, they limited national government within its delegated authority without handicapping its capabilities to fulfill its duties, and maintained a strict separation of government powers between the three national branches. State supreme court cases have been largely ignored by Civil War scholars. However, these decisions reveal the substantive and normative nature of constitutional principles in the Confederacy. The specific holdings in these cases contradict earlier historiographical understandings of the Confederacy as a loose confederation of states with each acting independently

Haris, Ira

Born in Charleston, NY on May 31, 1802. Senator from NY and professor at Albany Law School from 1867 until his death on December 2, 1875.https://digitalworks.union.edu/alumnifiles_1824/1027/thumbnail.jp