Its clear she will bring an awful lot to Virginia Tech with teaching, research, and outreach programs as well. She specializes in 19thcentury u. S. History, including, of course, the civil war era, but also north american slavery more generally. Warfare more generally as well. Appeared inhas civil war monitor and Civil War History journal, among other publications. Her big project at the moment is converting her phd dissertation into a book. That will be well worth looking out for a few years down the line. It is on the very same topic. You can see the powerpoint is already up there. Under the rebel lash black prisoners of war in the confederate south. She will speak for about 25 to 35 minutes, which will give us plenty of time for discussion. And i think a big advantage of the zoom format is you will be able to type in your questions using the q a feature. You will not be able to use the chat in the webinar, but you can use the q a button if you have a question, and you can type those in any time during the talk, after the talk. And of course, we may not be able to get all the questions depending on how many you ask, but we will answer as many as we can. We will wrap things up by about 8 15. Ok, that is all for me. Please join me in whatever the remote version of a round of applause might be. Maybe it is a round of applause as i invite dr. Newhall to begin her talk. Dr. Newhall great. Thank you so much, paul. I really appreciate that introduction. And thank you so much, everybody, for being here tonight. Its such a pleasure to share my research with you and go through some of the details of my findings. This has been a labor of love of the last six years and will continue for many years beyond, so i am excited to have a conversation with you, hear your thoughts about some of what i am telling you about tonight, and just really try to understand the complexities. Of what this time period can bring. Generous centers and donors, i will be referencing this a few times tonight, but ive got some of the centers and donors who really helped contribute to my ability to be able to do this research. This was a sixyearlong process, no joke. It took a long time and a lot of labor. So to really recognize what the Virginia Center for civil war ofdies can do, the institute africanamerican research cannot be understated. I want to give them a quick shout out, so you can see what they are capable of. And just keep having these conversations with us as we move forward. So, im going to give you a bit of an overview, how i am going to address this topic and go through it. Some of the key concepts just to give you a broad sense of the ways i approached this research, how i did the research, and the what ies i put together, have interpreted based on what ive come up with through looking at thousands and thousands of records of the last few years. So i will tell you not just about the civil war, more broadly, but also what black prisoners of war were able to accomplish themselves, their direct action and their agency, even within very limited contingent circumstances that they had to navigate throughout the war. So their choices and their actions were just as important as policy in my opinion. So just ways of explaining some of the terms as well. I will refer to the usct and colorede United States infantry. The colored i will also go through some of describing the experiences like reclamation. I just want to give you a sense of how we will move through this topic. First and foremost, i want to discuss why black prisoners of war in the first place . One question i got very early on in this research was did black pows even exist . Werent they all executed upon capture . And so, when i revisited my topic when i first got to grad school, i was looking through the works of authors and historians they really more broadly. There was consistent discussion about black prisoners of war being taken alive. But most were presumed to have died in custody, because no one could track their movements if they did not enter into prison. Whyalso the on the idea of i Research Black prisoners of war is what i call them black prisoners of war. I will go through this. But the confederacy did not treat black soldiers as combatants, neither legitimate nor illegitimate combatants. The confederacy treated black soldiers as property. As reclaimed property. As recovered property. As property to be distributed and used as necessary. As property could not be and, as property, could not be treated in the same ways soldiers were, in particular white soldiers. I will go through some of those differences. I referred to them as black prisoners of war even though the confederacy did not because that is what they are. A black prisoner of war is illegitimate combatants, armed as a soldier of the United States and should have been protected under the laws of war, but within the bounds of the confederacy, that was stripped away. That is an important distinction, this idea of legitimacy and what these men had to do in order to survive and to navigate their captivity. Justyond even looking at black pows themselves, i want to look into some of the reasons why i started to look into these men as a large group and some of my findings that i think really push back against some of our existing knowledge. There is definitely existing research on black prisoners of war, really excellent history or , but there isphy also a consistent dual narrative that i kept running into when studying these men. First was that there was an emphasis on battles and not so much captivity. So we focus on the moment of capture but not so much the aftermath. What happened to these men who actually did survive . Once they were injured into captivity, what happened to them . Examples fromious the 54th massachusetts, for example. They were held in charleston. There were freemen held in prison. But beyond that, what happened is men who had vulnerability as formerly enslaved men, captured under the confederacy . So there has been this emphasis on battles and battlefield atrocities for very good reason. Black soldiers were very vulnerable when encountering battle, and there has been great work done on that. But what happens after capture . And not just what happens after capture but how many of these men even were able to survive . Those basic questions we just did not know about yet. Additionally, i also found there was this emphasis on a particular space in the civil war, which are prisons. Military prisons are definitely places where we encounter information on black prisoners of war, but beyond that, there were so few numbers reaching the prisons as a whole come out of the men who were known to be taken captive. , some estimated 800 men estimated 1200. So what happened to the others who did not make it . There is an assumption of mortality. There certainly was. But what i found in my research, as i went through compiled military Service Records, through pension files, i found that the reality was far more complex. Of incarceration and captivity went far beyond military prisons. Black prisoners of war were subjected to a diversity of captivities. Wereprisoners of war treated in certain ways, protected in certain ways. Black prisoners of war did not have that experience to the same degree. They were certainly incarcerated in military cousins, but quite a few were reclaimed by private enslavers. By private citizens of the confederacy. Quite a few were sold from out of these prisons to entirely new enslavers. In the majority were enslaved by the military and used in the same way as impressed and said people. Put to labor on military fortifications, for example. That is the utmost used to which black prisoners of war were picked. I argue, basically, this is not be confusing happenstance. The fact that so many men did survive and were able to navigate captivity should not be surprising to us, in large part because of the confederacys entire reason for being. Was to preserve slavery, protect slavery, and make use of enslaved people during the war effort, and they did that. In visible, awful, awful ways with black p. O. W. s. And they did that by treating black prisoners of war as war booty. That is something i really tried to emphasize. We will be talking about violence and restraint. Violence and restraint are basically two sides of the same coin for black prisoners of war. Violence and wishing could be applied to enslaved people by enslavers. The idea that restraint as mercy i disagree with. I see restraint as i calculated logic. So restraint is not necessarily mercy or benevolence. And survival is not necessarily an indication of concern for black soldiers. But the calculated logic of reclaiming these men and reconfiguring them, in a way, as enslaved people. So when Nathan Bedford forrest, for example, said Something Like asegard captured negroes property and not soldiers. It is not the policy to destroy to negro, on the contrary, preserve and protect them. He was not being facetious. And he was not being hypocritical, even though he said this several months after a massacre where hundreds of his soldiers died. This idea that restraint and violence could be used throughout the war was vital to the confederacy. I argue that restraint served the purposes of the confederacy as much as violence did, and that black pows who survived because of this restraint also made use of their knowledge of the confederacy in order to navigate it. The confederacy used past president s of precedence. Of 1812, for example, in the second seminole war, there are instances where those who escaped slavery still owed a lifetime of slavery, so they sought, basically, reclamation and restitution. The confederacy went into this apply legalnce to behavior to black pows. Applying property rather than legitimacy or illegitimacy. Essentially, i went to the records of more than 50 United States colored troop regiments to find black pows. Approximately records of about 2000. And i found at least 300 men were captured. And this is just my initial first three years of research. There is much more to be done. There is more to look through. By already identified 2300 men who were noted as captured him and i found that 70 of these men survived. More than 1500 men. Hundreds escaped. Hundreds resisted. And hundreds survived and outlived the confederacy and were able to make use of their freedom after the war to enter their own voices into the record, which i will talk about pete i am using this to con cupcake the existing interpretation, basically. But one of the main reasons it has been so difficult to find prisoners of war pows is because of the prevalence of narratives of white pows. So andersonville, one of the infamous places where there was high mortality rates around white pows white pows were codified. Their lives were recorded, and their deaths were recorded. They were a known entity for this is not the case for black pows. They were not recorded in the same ways, not followed in the same ways. They were basically reintegrated into the enslaved population in the confederacy. So for a long time, we had to rely on the record that came from these prisons to understand what black pows went through to begin with. So we relied on records from andersonville where we see their suffering, we get a sense of what they are going through, we can understand their conditions. And this really dictated a lot of the postwar discussion as well regarding captivity and pows. And also the suffering that white pows went through. White pows went through an inordinate amount of suffering in the spaces come in these prison camps, as seen in these photographs that came from andersonville who were so starved they basically looked like concentration camp victims. And that is an indelible memory that has been burned into the minds of americans when it comes to thinking about the incarcerated experience during the civil war. But we do not have this for black pows. To my knowledge, there is no existing photograph of a black prisoner of war in captivity. So that is something to be reckoned with. We also had to rely on white pows own writings about black pows. So they are only getting a snippet of the experience because they are contained to specific his insights. They are not seeing the vast majority. So this is something to reckon with when we thing about how to go beyond certain spaces, to look into different records. And one of the reasons why we have been able to glean what we can about black prisoners of war from white pows is the fact that so many were able to write memoirs after the war. More than 150 men were able to give some sense of memory of what they went through in the war, but also their high mortality rates were so unimaginable at the time, and their sufferings were unimaginable, so it really penetrated into the consciousness of americans. And this is why it has been so hard to really uncover black pows, because we just do not have the same written memories, the same visual culture that white pows did. Ofte pows provided a lot helpful information, but we prisoners what black of war had to say themselves about their experiences. But white pows were contained with black pows in several spaces, notably charlston with the 54th massachusetts paper something came massachusetts. But something that came out was the majority of black pows that we know about were freemen from the north. Men who were not previously enslaved and were held in this kind of limbo where they were neither free nor enslaved. They could not be exchanged under the terms of the confederacy. They did not have that right. Because black soldiers were inherently seditious and could incite slave insurrections. So they were dangerous. But they also were not experiencing captivity in the same ways as formally enslaved men. Years forok several me to figure out. Basically what i realized was black black had been the most visible group of thousands of men who had been formally enslaved were also held captive and also survived and were subjected to military enslavement, to sale, and to reclamation. In part because the confederacy argued that these men still owed laborers, and their condition had not changed with their entry into u. S. Territory and into the u. S. Territory. They are basically building on a precedent set by the fugitive slave act of 1850. Most of my research has been to follow the paths of these men, who entered prison briefly and then removed were removed from prison. What happened to these men who were removed from the uniform and returned to the enslaved population generally throughout the confederacy . Ando reiterate, slavery practices of antebellum slavery carried out through the war. There was a lot of consistency in how the confederacy treated black prisoners of war, and black prisoners of war, particularly those who had been enslaved, used their knowledge of enslavement to resist and operate within the circumstances of captivity. And they were able to make choices in order to survive. Difficult choices, for sure, but those were available to them. So this takes me to how did i even get to this point . How did i start my research . I started off with the typical resources we have had available for us to us for a very long time, particularly correspondence and policies created by highlevel politicians. We have a lot of understanding of the poly set the confederacy policies that the confederacy created. Saar started here, with the official records of war, sensually, and basically realized it medially there was going to be a difficulty with finding these men, because they are not referred to as prisoners of war, and they are neither referred to as soldiers. They are negro slaves captured in arms. They are captured slaves in yankee uniform. These kinds of euphemisms were applied to these men regularly, so i really had to apply my research to understand what was going on. Prisoners of war was just not applicable. There was this correspondence that spanned the entire civil war and there was very little, and i realize quickly i had to go beyond this set of sources that we have been relying on for so long. But i also realized that what Jefferson Davis is saying in 1862, which is a response to the preliminary emancipation proclamation, in an suspicion of the massive patient preparation being passed, that black soldiers would be affected and how to deal with them pay basically, he makes this argument that these men have to be delivered to state authorities and norther in order to be dealt with. According to the laws of the state, for sure, which would Court Processes as well as executions, but also this requires, essentially, keeping these men alive in order to deliver them to one place, from battlefield to executive authority of the state. So something to consider. I started pulling on this thread once i started thinking about this. What was going on with these men . But as i went through the official records, i kept finding these really interesting details, and i found come out of more than 120 volumes of correspondence, four instances of testimony from black men themselves, these firstperson testimonies. Two were from black sailors from new york and two were from black sergeants who had been captured in alabama. Long and asabout as detailed as we get in the official records. These are two sergeants, leach, anduckner and what they tell us reveals a lot. First that these men are being put to labor by the military. They are being forced to labor on railroads, being forced to do work for the military themselves and for the confederate war effort. They are also being returned to former enslavers. At least 250. And so we know that that is happening. Also, the fact that some of these men are being reclaimed i people who are claiming to be former enslavers but are, in fact, not. Also the fact that these men are able to escape and that some of these men are being sent into hospitals in order to be treated. So these small snippets just opened up this whole idea of what was going on on the ground for these men, that they were experiencing this variety of captivity. And so i started to expand my search beyond the official records, which is where i started. And i started to find things like general orders number 25, which basically established these depots for reclamation of escaped enslaved people initially intended for , noncombatants. People who had not entered into the United States army, that they established these depots, and basically all these urban spaces throughout the confederacy, in order for enslavers to come and reclaim people who had run away. And it established these practices that reflected antebellum slavery. By advertising for these people in newspapers. So i started looking through newspapers to see, ok, is there anything i can find about these men and whether or not they are being put through these kinds of processes . And, indeed, they were. I found several instances in newspapers, and some of them have been spoken up before, but to allthese connections orders 25 was very exciting for me, where these men were captured in uniform and then being advertised as if they were just runaway slaves to be reclaimed, regardless that they wore the uniform of the United States. It didnt matter. Once they were in the bounds of the confederacy, that did not matter, and what mattered most was upholding private property rights. This is evidenced in the way in which general orders 25 was upheld. There are a couple of examples here, one in the daily huntsville confederates in 1863 as well as in the aftermath of the battle of the crater in 1864. There are several newspapers articles that reference this and show these men being named, their former enslavers being named, where they are from, and they are basically being advertised, to come be reclaimed and taken out of these prisons. Basically, the confederacy is trying to propagate this process, essentially, of being reclaimed i former enslavers. It took place. And what is fascinating and something i am still trying to learn about there are all these silences and gaps in the historical record is how these men gave up such information . Why did these men reveal the name of former enslavers if they were enslaved . What did they get out of that . Where they forced to do it . Were they doing it voluntarily . I assume it was the latter. Were they doing it voluntarily . Was it a mix . I assume it was the latter. Theres very little documentation about this. Slavery and how it was enacted was very often informally done, which is why it has been so difficult to find these men. So beyond the newspapers, i deftly found several instances, but this is coming from white people. White people are recording what they are doing to black pows. But what are black pows themselves doing . I started with the compiled military Service Records to identify what i could. What i found was i had to look for these memoranda through pow records. Basically, i looked through recordingle service through an arm of ancestry. Com and see if i can find who had been reported as having been captive at one point or another. Sometimes, i was lucky and found things like this. A bow memoranda who was captured this p. O. W. Memoranda who was captured in the fall of 1864. Basically, once he is captured, he has been enslaved by a rebel officer and sent to work on that rebel officers plantation. And not only sent to work there but kept there until 1865. So these men were also sometimes being held well after the end of official hostilities between the United States and the confederacy, which just opened up a whole other can of worms for me. There were several i who definitely experienced to this to some degree or another. Unfortunately, most do not talk about it. This is where i started. But yet again, still, these men are being spoken of. And it is not their own step it is not their own testimony about what is happening. So i turned to the pension files. Things to my colleagues in graduate school, like eric burke, who suggested this, as well as my advisors. They suggested you really need to look through the pension files and see if you can find things about these men directly. That is exactly what i ended up doing. And by cost residency crossreferencing the compiled military Service Records, i found 2300 men or so. At least 715 were able to apply for pensions after the war. So that is a group of 715 men who potentially gave voice to their captivity experience. And the pension files are incredible resources. They can range from a few pages to hundreds of pages long. It is all this process of a man trying to essentially get compensation from the federal government after war, particularly if he had been injured or developed a disability of some kind from the until 1890,at least when it was expanded a little bit. I will not get into that, but just so you know the pensions included pension files included included medical records, they had to submit for examination. And most important, for me, affidavits, where these men had to speak to pension agents one on one and talk about and confirm the facts of what they went through during their military service. And if i was lucky, and a lot of these men do talk about it to some degree, they mention their captivity. When they were captured, what happened to them, where they were incarcerated. Sometimes, how they were treated, whether they escaped or not, the people with whom they were incarcerated, because they had to get when it is to affirm these facts. It literally took a community to create a pension file. So theres all this information that still has to be pulled out from these files, but this is where i started, to find what these men were saying one on one. So i could find men like abraham rolf, who ran back home after being hired out initially, who was brutally punished by his former enslavers , who was actually in the house of representatives for a while, but also was able to win privileges back, even though he soldier, evend though he was actively resisting the confederacy. He was able to marry a woman and visit her nine miles away, and then ultimately escaped with her. And they had for the rest of their lives and never communicated again with their families. These are the kinds of stories that suddenly started to emerge as i went through these pension files. So they were able to acquire about 350 ive gone through most of them and really started to build this holistic picture of what was going on the on the prisons. What was happening after reclamation, after people had been sold . There are several men, like richard french, who was sold out of a prison in richmond, virginia, ended up in greensboro, north carolina, imprisoned and enslaved by a moveder and ultimately down to louisiana after the war. Or men like say mo brooks, who at the battlered of fort pillow who was sent to mobile, alabama, where he labored as a blacksmith for the rest of the war and was aided by a white irishwoman to escape. And these are still just slivers of these mens lives. This is just about their military service. It does not give the full picture of who they are, what they went through, from birth to death, but it does give us something to start working with and to really expand upon what we know about military service for black men, particularly for formally enslaved black men, who just did not have the privilege to write about their experiences, whose lives were not codified in records by former enslavers, their births, marriages, deaths before the war and after the war. Former enslavers made their claims, but they certainly did not aid them by codifying their lives, to any degree, to state records. They always held onto that information and how that power, that was something that black prisoners of war continue to have to negotiate after the wars end. But they were built to take direct action and make these difficult choices to survive. Their survival is not an it is a combination that reveals a complexity of what was going on on the ground. Luckily, through the pension files ive been able to expand a little on the photographic history of black prisoners of war. There is a series of photographs in existence of a black prisoner of war named priavte Hubbard Pryor. It is often referenced as a clearcut effect of what happened Hubbard Pryor is pictured in enslaved clothes and then the after of when he enlisted. So what it meant to suddenly become a citizen, essentially, a soldier, what effect that had. But he was also a prisoner of war. He was captured, along with several hundred other men, but we do not have his photograph from captivity. And we can presume some things, like many maybe he was attempted to be returned to his enslaved clothes, to some degree, but we do not have much beyond that. This is one of the few photographs in existence. But i was able to locate that of private richard french, in the 44th with private Hubbard Pryor. And this is his photograph eases during his pension application process to identify him to his comrades, with people whom he had been employed any way to identify him with how these photographs had been used, and it had not been opened since 1894. It was really exciting to find this. I had assistance from archivists at the national archive. They really helped me to navigate some of these difficulties of figuring out how to pull these files and go through them, but basically, this work has only just begun. I am hoping to find more photographs of men like richard french, but i think richard frenchs photograph is really important for another reason. Not just that we have this photograph of him after the war but that his photograph really emphasizes survival. And what these men were able to do after the war, during the war, prior to the war, how they theseble to navigate highly contingent, terrifying circumstances in order to survive. And not only to survive but to enter their own perspective into historical records, to push back against this silencing of their lives in historical records. And we now have hundreds of voices to work with that i think will open up a lot of different avenues of research that i am quite excited to look through. So we can reconcile with the implications of federal policy of slavery in the confederacy and really understand what it meant to have violence and restraint take place during the war. So thank you so much for your attention during this time. And this is a closeup of his photo, so you can better see him. The original is the card as i found it in the archives, so i was able to fiddle with the coloring a bit. This is private richard french. Was a great man, basically, and he went through some incredible things that i cannot even begin to imagine, so i really want to emphasize that his photograph can give a sense of what was possible during the civil war. And to not make these rash there is a lot more to be found. There is a lot of Exciting Research to be done here. I cannot wait to find out more in what happens. By want to give you all my Contact Information as well, if i do not get to your questions during the q a. Please feel free to reach out to me and contact me. Follow me on twitter, follow the an incredible organization. But with that, i want to say thank you so much and i look forward to hearing your questions. And that is it for the presentation. [laughter] paul thank you so much. That was wonderful. And if i was not careful, i can almost hear people around the country and if i listen carefully, i can almost hear people around the country clapping. So we have a good number of questions. Feel free to keep them coming in the q a, using the q a button in zoom. I guess i will select a couple for us to get started with. And, as i said in the beginning, try to get through as many of these as we can. One of the questions that a couple of different people have asked, actually, is in regards to dissension between formally enslaved black man and formally free black men, and whether there was any part on the part of confederate authorities to really distinguish between those groups . Dr. Newhall yeah, so, again, this is a continued process that i am trying to figure out the intricacies out, but i definitely have found some correspondence, particularly the secretary of war from the confederacy, his communications with some of these southern governors, particularly the governor of south carolina, where they were having particular difficulty of figuring out how to navigate treating freemen from the north versus formally enslaved men. And the governor had actually helped institute a Legal Process to try them and they had captured in charleston, but they ran into issues very quickly, because the local courts did not want to enter into this issue. They did not feel that they had the jurisdiction over black soldiers. They were very nervous and hesitant about her, because they did not quite know if it should be a federal issue i should say confederate government issue, if he should be a State Government issue, or not. What happened was they determined they could really only deal with men they knew to be formally enslaved. They put about four men on trial, couldnt come to anything conclusive, and just sent them back into the prisons. And i think that really helps elucidate some of the complexity that is going on on the ground here. And that is not worth it. I discovered myself either that was another historian whose name im blanking out on who wrote about it in the 1980s. Basically talking about the legal issues that confederates were confronting, because they also had to make themselves seem legitimate. It was not just an issue of black prisoners of war legitimacy, it was also about confederate legitimacy, and whether they, themselves, were committing illegal acts and trying to gain the support of foreign entities like britain and france. So they were very cognizant of some of the issues where they may be overstepping their bounds. So even when it came to black prisoners of war who were executed in the immediate aftermath of capture, they buried that information. There were a couple of instances where confederates are debating what to do with a couple of colonels who basically facilitated an execution in louisiana, and they basically decided not to do anything about it, because they were worried about retaliation from the United States, because lincoln instituted this retaliatory law in 1863, so they were very cognizant of the mess that they could step into. So to them, in a way, having these men imprisoned or returning them to enslavers where the two easiest options. Or just making use of their labor in the military. Freemen occupied a different status, because they did not owe any labor to enslavers, and because they could not be identified as formally enslaved men, there was not much to be done about treating them as property, essentially. Whereas for formerly enslaved men i still do not know the intricacies of this process. I know in some, papers were so sometimes the records of the enslavers were noted in their military Service Records. Those were some ways in which the confederacy were able to make distinctions and identify enslaved versus not enslaved, it was messy and complicated. [laughter] long story short. Its complicated. Prof. Quigley i can imagine that was really difficult, to prove identity in any definitive sense anyway. This was an era where people did not walk around with paper forms of identification, so i can imagine if a white southerner said that as my former slave, i want him back, than most people around would say, ok, and simply accept that. Dr. Newhall yes. And we see that happen with sergeant leach, who i had his little report. He was claimed by a man claiming to be his former and slaver, who was not, so that definitely did happen, where people were taking advantage of the lacquer of records to just snatch people up. Prof. Quigley and speaking of records, that was, for me, and it seems, based on the questions , for other people as well, one of the most interesting parts of your talk, was when you are dressed the question of what kinds of evidence you had to work with on this topic and showed us a little bit about the official records, pension records, compiled Service Records. So a couple of people asked about other forms of evidence that you may have looked at or may look at in the future, one of them, for example, which comes from matthew, a professional archivist in north carolina, wonders whether you at the about lookinga wills of surviving black pows. He assumes to have come he seems to come across some evidence where people left evidence. And someone else asks about grand army of the Republic Records and the Union Veteran organization, have you looked at these, is this something that is worth doing . Dr. Newhall no. [laughter] i have not looked at them. They are on my slate, for sharon tate ive been told many times ive to get in touch with barbara gannon. She is on my list. I know she has incredible records of what people are doing with the g. A. R. But i was very much confined to the federal records i had. Basically, if anybody is familiar with the pension files in d. C. , that is where i was collecting most of my evidence, really focusing on the records that i knew about that i could identify from afar and then collect in person. You can only pull 20 to 24 a day, so i was going weeks for a time and then pulling them and photographing them, not even looking at them, and then going through them afterwards, which is what i got about 350 over the course of four years. But it took a long amount of time. My next step is more localized records, go to these areas where i knew some of these men were from. Basically what im doing for the book is focusing on particular individuals, who i think are representative of particular occurrences of captivity. So abraham rolf, richard johnson, who richard french. I will basically try to find records from where they were, their families and dissented cendants, theif form their former enslavers, if they had them. And just expand upon what i can familyspecially with papers. It will take the next 20 years of my life. I am really excited about it. Prof. Quigley really hard but potentially rewarding work. If youre digging for the needle in the haystack through all that evidence. Dr. Newhall and knowing who they are is really helpful. I will use that for the next stage of research. When i can leave my apartment. [laughter] prof. Quigley and hopefully, some of them have unusual names. Because trying to search for someone called john brown. Dr. Newhall george washington. [laughter] prof. Quigley we have a question from kristin about the process of applying for pensions. And again, these records are clearly fascinating. To tell you about wartime experiences but also may be about the postwar climate. So kristin is asking whether black soldiers faced additional faculties claiming pension due racism. Dr. Newhall that is an excellent question. Good to see you here. That was absolutely a problem. Black soldiers and particularly formerly enslaved men. Freemen from the north had a little easier time, because generally, they tended to be literate compared to formerly enslaved men generally. Generally had an easier time acquiring evidence from people around them. Formerly enslaved people do not have ways to identify themselves. They still had to prove that they existed in the first place, when they applied for pensions. So a lot of the trouble that formerly enslaved people encountered was they had to just prove who they were to begin with and that they had even served in the regiments that they claim to. And the difficulty for black pows was because there was so little recorded about their captivity, they also have that added layer of having to prove what happened to them once they disappear from the regiments. There was a ton of skepticism from white pension agents pay they were very, very skeptical of formerly enslaved peoples claims. They basically treated them as lying until proven correct. Much were often rated lower than white witnesses. And somewhat of a stately, pension agents trusted former than slavers far more formerly enslaved people. Anyway, that created a more robust record, because they were treated as special examiners. Where special examiners would be sent out to determine the facts of what was going on with these men. They would do special investigations. They question people repeatedly. Go to employers, family members, neighbors, former enslavers, so this really created a very robust catalog of records for these men. So the somewhat tragic irony of that is that it also enabled us to really understand them to a better degree come because they were subjected to such skepticism and racist skepticism. Yeah. Quigley i sort of expected that. But it is really interesting to hear you explain how that operated in the decades after the civil war. So another question asks about the men who were reenslaved. After being captured. And are there examples where rebellions or slavery aftersted being returned to former slaveholders . Dr. Newhall i have final instances of violent resistance from black pows. Something i talked about during my dissertation that i hope to expand upon in the book there are mass operates on several occasions from black pows from prisons. These men tussled with their white guards but do not do anything. They do not steal their weapons, do not fire on them, they are basically just trying to get free. And that is something pointed about in a recent book, the calculus of violence i think it is called. [laughter] i am really blanking out on ev ery book. But he is basically talking about black americans wanted freedom. They did not want revenge. They are very cognizant of the fact that violent resistance will be met with severe consequences. And that is something we see throughout the antebellum period as well, particularly with slave narratives like budget Douglas Frederick douglass autobi ography, that the consequences of violent resistance were terrifying. So they were trying to find ways to navigate without violence. Where even if they are caught, they cant be held accountable for that. I dont know how conscious that is. But really i cannot find any information of a black prisoner of war killing or hurting a guard at all. I have not found that. Prof. Quigley all right. Thank you. So a question about the kind of broader context of prisoners of war from brad nichols. Hes wondering about what might be the advantages of placing black civil war pows not only kind of in comparison with white pows, as you are obviously doing, but also with other pows in different modern wars . Is that something you think is worthwhile or not . Dr. Newhall absolutely. [laughter] ofhink there are a lot interesting connections that could be made in talking, particularly about black military experiences into the 20th century and the particular contingencies that black prisoners of war, throughout history, have had to deal with because of their lack of production under laws and discrimination against them. I do not know that much about the history of wars and the 20th century when it comes to that, but i know there are people doing that work. It is something im definitely interested in. One thing i would love to do after this book is to expand this, go into the past, go into the future not the future, the present. [laughter] variousk about the connections and ways in which the laws of war were applied, the ways in which the laws of war were violated, and what it means to be a black soldier, generally speaking, in these areas of context. But that is a great question. I do not have specifics for you yet, but maybe in a few years. Jonathan jones, who is actually one of our featured speakers this semester, it is great to see you here, or see evidence that you are here in your typed question, i should suspectasking and i this may be a difficult thing to pin down but he is asking do you have a sense of, roughly, the proportion of black soldiers taken prisoner versus executed as soon as they were captured by the confederacies . Dr. Newhall no. [laughter] i am still struggling with that. That is a really tough thing to figure out, in large part because of how these men are being spoken of, how they are being recorded as black prisoners of war. It is really tough to determine , those firstred moments after they were captured. The numbers are not clear. It is something im going to have to revisit when going through the compiled military Service Records and other records when it comes to the casualties is really trying to figure out, maybe, the finer points about who was a prisoner and who dies in action versus who dies in captivity. Out of the records ive have found, there are around at least men who die in captivity that i 700 know of. And i suspect quite a few of them were in the immediate aftermath. Colonel johnson of the 44th, who was a white officer, was exchanged two days after his capture while 600 men were returned into slavery, basically. He notes that at least six men were killed in the immediate aftermath. Another man of the 44th talks about how he was part of a mass escape, where he escaped with 21 other men. All 21 except for him were killed, drowned in a river in on their way to escape. So there are ways of figuring that out. I have not gotten there yet. The numbers are really tough to determine. But i am hoping to have something more definitive there. So my numbers are in flux, and they are definitely more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule. But based on what i found, i think there is really strong evidence of survival as well. So that is something i definitely emphasize, also because i can speak to that more definitively than executions in the immediate aftermath. I know it is happening. I know it happens in plymouth and a variety of other places, but it is hard to figure out. Because again, a lot of euphemisms are used died in captivity, died of brutality. And i do not know when and do not know how, so that is an ongoing process. Prof. Quigley yeah, that is a tough one. This is a question from me. Even though there are other questions and we will get to them. But i am really curious about uniforms, which you mentioned several times in your talk paid it just really fascinated me, when you talked about uniforms as such a powerful symbol. That africanamerican men were bona fide soldiers, and International Law applied to them, particularly when they return to the confederate states. What happened to their uniforms . Presumably, they were not allowed to continue wearing them or to own them in any way . But what actually happened . Dr. Newhall so i guess this is just going to be my stock answer for everything it is complicated. [laughter] good one. Ley it is a dr. Newhall some get to keep them, some dont. Abram rawls, whom i mentioned, he is an instance talking about the removal of his uniform. That happens after his reclamation. Basically, he is brought back, brought by his former enslaver, to the farm next to theirs, and intentionally has his uniform stripped and his clothes proper slave clothes, as he calls it. Abram manages to hang onto his belt buckle, and i believe his future wife manages to salvage that. So theres a lot going on unspoken. Others had the uniform stripped immediately after capture. The removal of the uniform was a really powerful means of negating their service and their freedom and their independence, and i think that happened quite a lot. I am not totally sure about the total numbers where that happens, but definitely happens a lot to black pows. And part of what i think there is such difficulty in being able to locate their captivity, if we have photographs of captive black pows, they are going to be hard to find, because they will probably have been stripped of their uniforms, so it is hard to identify them as such. That was definitely an intentional tactic that confederates, both in the military and private citizens, used as a means of sending a message to other enslaved people as well, which is that there are consequences for doing this, and youre going to watch and see it. Prof. Quigley yeah. Yeah, powerful things, clearly. Angela, first of all, says this exclamatoin point, which is fantastic to see. And asked if you could speak about the Actual Experience within prison camps of black prisoners. Things like where they segregated from white prisoners . Where they allowed medical treatment . Somebody else, actually, is interested in the medical treatment as well. Dr. Newhall yes. I have a whole chapter on medical treatment in my dissertation, so i will talk about that in a second. It also just depended on the prison. A lot of black pow experiences are contextual and depend on where they end up, Whose Authority they are under, who they have to deal with. So there are men in libby who are placed with white officers as a means of degrading the white union officers. That is an intentional tactic that the confederates used. A lot of the times, they were segregated. I know that happens of the old city jail in charleston. They are kept on a whole separate floor, but they are interacting, sometimes, on the grounds when they are let out for activity. I know in andersonville, there was a whole group of men congregated around the Southern Gate of black pows, where it seems that almost self segregated they are mentioned as kind of gathering around the Southern Gate. And they are also being taken out for burial duty. You know, they are digging out the graves for the prison. They are working alongside but kept separate from local enslaved people who have been impressed for the purpose. There is also resentment with white pows, who had previously been able to exit the prison, and it was one of their few forms of relief to perform that kind of labor, so once black pows are in the mix, it has been taken away from them. So in a sense, black pows had more mobility. Black pows are often charged as having better treatment, less oversight, in some ways. So it is interesting and super complicated and seems to really depend on what prison they entered into, what structure the prison was by the time they got there the presents were a mess. I know you know that. People were figuring out as they went, so a really seem to depend on who the commander was. Turner at castle funder was particularly nasty, and i know that he was doing questionable things. So a really ran the gamut, i think. It seems like there was some segregation, though, and then intentionally mixing these people as a way to insult the white soldiers. Prof. Quigley a question about another kind of research tactic, i guess, that i suspect may be another timeconsuming one. He is asking have you ever tried to look for letters from the confederate soldiers who captured black Union Soldiers or were guards for them in prison camps . Is that even possible, or is that just too difficult . Dr. Newhall i imagine it could be. I really have not looked into confederates very much, who were in charge. I have been mostly looking at higherlevel guys. Ethe i am not looking at the higherlevel guys. Thats certainly something to consider. But, no, i havent. I assume it would be really interesting. Forgive youssume not doing absolutely everything. And a great thing about turning your dissertation into a book is to fill in this research and fill in these gaps. Dr. Newhall thank you, everyone. I will deftly take these forward as i work on the definitely kicked us forward as i worked on the manuscript. Mark barrow asks if theres a difference between native american soldiers taking captive and whether the treatment was different . Dr. Newhall yes. I am not as sure about the eastern theater. There are several instances where native americans are fighting for the confederacy, are involved in the atrocities toward black soldiers. And so, i know they are involved. That is something i am hoping to talk to other people about. I know that they are doing that work. Really understudied area. Andersonville, for example. Asking whether there is evidence of black prisoners were tortured in the prison . Ofan imagine other forms extreme violence being inflicted . , absolutely. Yes one of the issues of being forced to work for the they are having to mount guns. They are working in mobile bay. They are shivering in the cold. They are being treated quite harshly. I know that there are several instances where men are attacked , essentially without provocation. They basically talk about how in the middle of the night they cant tell the top is full and get attacked from behind by a guard who tries to staff him through the kidneys with his bayonet. He manages to fight him off. Be identified,ot so he gets through the rest of captivity. Survival is not safety. This happens to a number of men. Raciste that was retaliation. I dont have many more specifics beyond just general brutality and working quite hard. Ont know very much about stocks being used. Theres definitely a man from the 54th at andersonville. He is literate. This is a major, major trespass essentially. He is ordered to be with i think 500 times. And the soldier who is whipping him mitigates that. This is the soldier talking about the ways there is participating and they are still enforcing it. Its definitely happening. Sam flora asks about the what blackuation and pows did during the war. Most people return to where they had been originally. They have families. There are men like abram rolfe in tennessee who never see their families again in alabama. But a lot of these people have to navigate their interpersonal relationships with the people who enslaved them prior to the war because that is who they know. You see jim crow laws being implemented. Most are reentering into physical labor, working in quarries, as tenant armors. In the north, theres a little more diverse city. Merchantty to do more type work. Its very different on the south. Yes, we start out there. Love them ultimately moved to different places. But they are returning to their families. The postwar time is very complicated and i am looking for to trying that out more. Drug that out more. It is almost a survivor by a still pending, because guys who were still alive decades after , they can the war lead lives and healthy lives. Dr. Newhall they are barely eking out a living. They have to deal with physical labor and they cannot do as much as ablebodied men. Its really hard to make a whole living wage. A lot of them are really struggling and that is why the tension becomes necessary after the war. They needed, they need the extra support. You see instances of them having to rely on their communities for charity. I think that might be one reason why warmer slavers do support their pension files. So the fact that they are supporting black soldiers in getting pensions after the war is pretty interesting. Since they dont have that same claim to their bodies and their labor is my guess. Just thinking out loud i can a whitesituations where person a former black pow rinse the land and they have a vested interest in the Financial Health of their renter. If they cannot work as much, that makes selfinterest for the tenant farmers for sure you read that definitely happened with a couple men who hurt their claims because they were hiding their injuries from their employers. Complicated. Ly. I guess one final question you did talk to this indirectly. Thebody was asking about slaveryhe civil war and and he is interested in the moments where the confederates over. , ok, slavery is slaves are now free. When did that happen . Was there documentation issued . . Hat is your response to that dr. Newhall i dont know. As late were being held as 1867, even after Andrew Johnson declares the war ended. And that is part of weight is difficult because they are still held in captivity to some degree, even though technically they are not combatants anymore. I dont know about specific documentation, but my feeling is the former confederates are not really former confederates. They still feel as entitled to and weabor and bodies see that in the rise of the prison system and the ways in which slavery if all. It does not really in. It does not really in. I do not know about the documentation of that, but i have some guesses. Slavery did not have an endpoint. T shifted thats a great answer to the question, i think. Unfortunately, weve gotten. Hrough most of the questions we are just about out of time. I really want to thank caroline very much for her presentation. I also want to thank the audience members for being near and attending the event and asking such great questions. Lots of homework and new things to think about, which is great. There is that scope. Trying new things. It is great to have ideas. Appreciate carolines demonstration. Caroline, thank you very much. This American History tv on cspan3. Feature 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. The first tv president ial campaign ads aired between the dwightntest between eisenhower and adelaide stevenson and have been essential to every campaigns. Here is a look. Each day, many people come to andoval office with advice information. But president carter must decide alone. Theesident can never escape responsibilities of truly understanding issue himself. That is the only way a president ial decision can be made and the only way this president has ever made one. President carter. I deeply resent and am offended by the attacks that doesnt carter has made on my husband, his attempts to paint my husband as a man he is not. Its a terrible thing to say about anybody. That is campaigning on fear. There are many issues in this campaign. I would like mr. Carter to explain to me why laois and is as high as it is, why employment is as high as it is. I would like him to explain the fossil lading, week Foreign Policy so our friends do not know what were going to do, and the issue of this campaign is his record. Strongtime is now for leadership. Ofyou can find Plenty Campaign ads on our website. Of knowledgestate at the beginning of the civil. Ar she described advances later in the war such as sterilization surgery. Structive this was part of a symposium on the war in the east posted by the emerging war blog. Welcome. Going online to this years event. I like to give a shout out to our guest. Also thank you to our coordinators. Also, thank you to our friends at cspan for sharing American History, a very important task. Our final speaker for today