Abstract: This essay proposes synthesizing the growing literature on nineteenth-century Native legal history as a "long history of Indian Removal." While traditional narratives of Removal usually end with the deportations of southeastern Native nations, legal and political ideologies forged then continued to dominate debates over Native status through the 1880s. The framing provides an alternative to the dominant "Greater Reconstruction" paradigm, emphasizing continuity over the rupture of the Civil War. The essay demonstrates how states and settlers used Removal-era tools to blunt federal legal protections for Native nations in the antebellum West and justify violence against Native peoples. Post–Civil War shifts in federal law, including the 1871 end of treaty-making and the 1885 Major Crimes Act, represented the federal government's belated adoption of state arguments for jurisdiction over Native nations. This essay also explores how Indigenous communities navigated these jurisdictional attacks, emphasizing that the era's core legal questions remain unsettled.
Abstract: This essay examines the circumstances surrounding the reunion of the Episcopal Church in October 1865. Unlike Protestants of other denominations, Episcopalians remained united during the antebellum period but split in 1861 due to political secession. Then, the Episcopal Church reunited just six months after the conflict's end. How could Northern and Southern bishops reconcile their differences? Using the Episcopal Church as a case study in sectional reconciliation, this essay argues that reunion occurred because Northerners acquiesced to terms favorable to white Southerners. Animated by a conservative theological ideology, white Southerners refused to reenter the Church if compelled to admit fault or change their attitudes regarding race, slavery, or secession. As a result, most Northern Episcopal bishops avoided candid discussions of sectional issues, fearing that such debates would jeopardize reunion. White Southern bishops returned to the Church with views similar to those they held during the antebellum era, leading to the continued dominance of white paternalistic control in the Church. The Episcopal Convention likewise provided few resources or opportunities for autonomy or advancement for Black worshippers, causing many African Americans to leave the Church or face being treated as second-class worshippers.
Abstract: Recent scholarship has greatly expanded what historians know about the environmental context and consequences of the Civil War. Much of the existing literature emphasizes the various kinds of destruction wrought by the conflict. This article reconsiders that paradigm as it applies to the wild animals of the American South. Contemporaries observed that wildlife proliferated during and immediately after the war, a consequence of humans turning their hunting rifles on one another and abandoning vast swaths of agricultural land—counteracting trends in place since the colonial period. By rebutting the notion that soldiers annihilated wild game and then investigating evidence for animal population growth, the article proposes that a full environmental history of the Civil War era must include analysis of wild ecosystems.
Abstract: Through an analysis of the arguments about climate, contiguity, and distance made by opponents of the Alaska Purchase, this essay examines the spatial anxieties shadowing the evolution of US expansionism during a postwar moment in which innovation in, and the expansion of, technological systems was revolutionizing imperial possibilities. It traces the role of space in identifying national compatibility and, relatedly, in identifying human and racial difference. The first part focuses on how misperceptions that Alaska's climate was exceedingly and uniformly cold encouraged a belief that the region could not fit within a framework of territorial expansion that was still primarily predicated on visions of white settlement. In the second part, this essay considers the place of territorial contiguity in the expansionist imagination, showing how policymakers and pundits worried that noncontiguous expansion was a harbinger of disunity, even as old spatial precepts were being challenged by new imperial realities.
Abstract: The focus of this article is the Militia of Pardo Men of Rio de Janeiro (free and freed-men of color) at the turn of the nineteenth century. Drawing on petitions and official letters, it demonstrates the importance of the militia as an institutional space through which pardo men residing in the city organized themselves collectively. By rendering valuable military services, these men learned to mobilize themselves to challenge the royal bureaucracy to obtain what they judged to be a right. Here, the notion of a right did not, as it already did in the United States, refer to the liberal world of universal civil rights. Rather, pardo officers demanded the enforcement of recent laws granting them access to higher militia ranks. The first generation had to confront the staunch opposition of colonial administrators and the local elite to their claims. Yet, this generation’s achievements consolidated the militia of pardo men of Rio de Janeiro, encouraging younger officers to become more engaged, starting in 1821 in the fight for Brazilian independence and leading some young pardo men to launch themselves politically through the press in 1831.
Abstract: This article examines demands for restitution within the context of abolitionist struggles in 1880s Brazil, investigating competing visions of work reorganization and citizenship. It situates the struggle of Hermínia da Conceição for her freedom and her salaries alongside the work of the Black abolitionist José do Patrocínio, who championed the cause of restitution and wages for the formerly enslaved and their descendants. At a moment when slave-owners and planters were demanding compensation for lost property in persons as a condition for abolition, popular and radical abolitionists called for immediate and unconditional abolition. Some demanded still greater rights and reparations for freedpeople. Doing so, this study sheds light on the role of wage labor in the uneven processes of emancipation and labor regimes reorganization that, rather than dismantling coercion, diversified its forms amid the struggles to overcome slavery as a system of domination.
Abstract: This special issue examines how Brazilian historians have engaged with legal sources to reconstruct the experiences of Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous peoples in nineteenth-century Brazil. Since the 1980s, historians of Brazil have been asking new questions about the workings of the law, achieving nuanced understandings of enslavement, freedom, and the changing meanings of race over time. That scholarship led to Brazilian contributions to the “social history of the law,” in which courts were important arenas of contestation and power struggle. Grounded in close readings of the archival sources, the Brazilian contribution to nineteenth-century historiography has extended far beyond mere understanding of the Brazilian context or comparison with U.S. scholarship. Instead, these works have critically challenged traditional concepts of race, highlighting actions by enslaved and freed Afro-Brazilians that questioned established racial hierarchies and expanded notions of rights and social expectations.
