Doctoral fellow and virginia sensor for civil war studies. Im certainly really glad she is here and i think you all will be as well once you hear her talk. Its clear she will bring an awful lot to Virginia Tech in terms of teaching, research and outreach programs as well. She specializes in 19th century u. S. History. It but also north american slavery more generally. Her writing as appeared in civil war monitor annes and Civil War History journal among other publications. Her big project at the moment is converting her ph. D. Dissertation into a book. That is going to be well worth looking at a few years down the line. Its in the same topic we will speak about tonight. You can see the power point is already up there. Black prisoners of war in the confederate south. Under the rebel lash. Hero she was big for 30 or 35 minutes, which will leave us plenty of time for discussion. I think another advantage of the zoom format is that you can type in your questions using the queue and a feature. So you wont be able to use in the chat and the weapon, which will be able to use the qanon button if you have a question. You can type those in any time during the top, after the top, and of course we may not be able to get interim all the questions, through all the questions depending on how many you ask, but we will certainly try to address as many as we possibly can. We will wrap things up by about a 15. Okay, that is all from the. Please join me in whatever the remote version of a round of applause might be. I dont know, maybe it is a round of applause. I invite doctor newhall to begin her top. Over to. You write. Thank you so much, paul. I appreciate that lovely introduction. Thank you so much, everybody, for being here tonight. It is such a pleasure to be able to share my research with you and go through some of the details of my findings. This has been a labor of love for the last six years and will continue for many years beyond. So im excited to have a conversation with you. I want to hear your thoughts about some of what i am telling you about tonight. Just really try to understand the complexities of what this time period can bring. So speaking of generous donors, i will be referencing this a few times tonight. 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 six year long process. Zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero its like a long time a lot of favor. So really to recognize but places like the Virginia Center for civil war can do the job more forceable history. Each or suggest you guys know about them what theyre capable of and join their list as well and just keep having these conversations with us as we move forward. Ten so im going to give you a bit of an overview of well talk about tonight. How im going to address this topic. There will be key concepts all be talking about, just to give you a broad sense of the way our approach this research, how i conducted it, the resources i had to clip to put this together. And my findings basically when i have interpreted, based on what ive come up with, looking through thousands and thousands of records over the last few years. So all tell you not just about the civil war, but more broadly what people can tell us about that, but also a black prisoners of war were able to accomplish themselves, their direct action and agency, even when within or limited contingent circumstances that they had to navigate throughout the war. Their choices and their actions were just as important as policy in my opinion. So just to explain some of the terms. On a lob to the u. S. City, a cia a couple of times. Thats the United States core troops, the body of black soldiers were fighting for the United States. The United States infantry which was one facet of that group. Also be going through some of the terms that i go over in describing their variety of experiences and proclamation. Dont worry about those just yet but i wanted to put this up on screen so you have some sense of what im talking about and how im going to move through this topic. So 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 lack peeled abuse even exist . More they all executed upon capture . And so when i revisited my topic when i got the grad school, i was looking through various authors and historians, like my despair and fabian, william marvel, they really sparked my research and thinking about black p. O. W. s more broadly. There is a consistent discussion of black prisoners of war being taken alive, but most being presumed of died in contest custody, because no one could track their movements if they entered a prison. Even beyond the idea, why studying black prisoners of war, as why call them black prisoners of war . I go through this in detail, but the confederacy did not treat black soldiers as combatants, neither legitimate or illegitimate combatants. The main argument that i look at in my work is that confederacy tree black soldiers as reclaimed property, we covered property. As property to be distributed and used as necessary. As property could not be treated in the same ways as soldiers were, as white soldiers in particular. So ill go through some of those differences. I refer them as black prisoners of war, even if the confederacy did not, because that is what they were. A black prisoner of war was a legitimate combatant, arm in the uniform of the United States, approved as a soldier by the United States, and should have been protected under the laws of war. But within the boundaries of confederacy, that protection was stripped away. They were protected in various, ways very minor ways as will talk. About thats an important distinction, this idea of legitimacy and what these men had to do in order to survive and to navigate their captivity. Beyond just looking at block peeled ideas themselves, i want to get into some of the reasons why i started to look into these men as a group, and some of my findings that i think really push back against some of our existing knowledge. Theres definitely existing knowledge on black prisoners of war, some very excellent historiography, particularly by george berke hard for example. But there is a consistent tool narrative that i kept running into one of his first studying these men. The first was that there was an emphasis on battles and not so much captivity so, we focus on the moment of capture but not the aftermath so much. What happened these men who actually did survive capture . Once they were entered into captivity what happened to them . We know from various examples of the 54th massachusetts, they were held in charleston. These were freeman who were held in prisons be on that, what happened to these man who had vulnerability as formally enslaved man once they were captured by the confederacy and treated under the property principle . So theres emphasis on battles in battle ship battles atrocities. Black soldiers were very vulnerable when encountering confederates in battle and theres been a lot of work done on that. But what happens after capture . That was one of the questions that i wanted to understand. Not just what happens after capture, but how many of these men were able to survive. Those basic questions we just didnt know about yet. And additionally, i also found there was this emphasis on a particular space in the civil war, which our military presence. Military prisons are definitely places where we encountered information on black prisoners of war, but beyond that there were so few numbers reaching the prisons as a whole, of the man who are known to have been taken captive. Benjamin floyd is estimated about 1200. What happened to the others who didnt make it to prison . Theres an assumption of mortality must be a part of the equation, and it certainly was. When i found in my research, as i went through militarys military service records, ill talk about that pensions. I found that the reality was far more complex and the sites of captivity, incarceration went far beyond military prisons. Black prisoners were subjected to a diversity of captivitys on. White p. O. W. s had a particular experience of captives in their confederacy. They were held in prisons, they were treated in certain, ways protected in certain ways. Black prisoners of war didnt have that experience, they were certainly incarcerated in military prisons 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 slavery. The majority were enslaved by the military and used in the same ways as slave people, forced labor. That was the most used which black prisoners views were used. I argue, that this is basically not a confusing happy stance. The fact that so many men did survive, were able to navigate captivity should not be surprising to us, and large part because of the confederacys entire reason for being, was to press save slavery, to protect slavery, and to make use of enslaved people during the war effort. They did that, invisible awful ways with black p. O. W. Is as well. They did this by treating black prisoners of war as war booty. This is something i try to emphasize in my book. So were gonna be talking about violence in restraint, where violence and restraint were essentially two sides of the same coin for black prisoners of war, as was the case of slavery. Violence and restraint could both be applied to enslaved people, by enslavers. Theodore that restraint is mercy, i disagree with. I see restraint as a calculated logic, kind of in keeping with doctor aaron sharon dean as talked about. So restraint is not necessarily mercy or benevolence. Survival is not necessarily an indication of concern for black prisoners of war while being. But the calculated logic of reclining these men and reconfiguring them and in a way as enslaved people. So a Nathan Bedford forest for example said Something Like i regard captured knee grows as i do other captured property and not as captured soldiers. It is not in the policy of the interest of the south to destroy destroy the black man, but on the contrary. He was not being facetious and hes not being hypocritical in his own estimation, even though we said this several months after the majority of black soldiers did in fact diana moment of capture. This idea that restraint in violence could be used throughout the war was vital to the confederacy. So i argue that restraint, serve the services of confederacy, and that black p. O. W. Sewers survive because of this restraint made use of their knowledge of confederacy in order to navigate it. So can fat federal sees past president s, of slavery and more fair. In the war of 1812 for example, and a second seminal war there were instances of the United States trying to get compensation for escaped enslaved people. Basically those who have escaped to the enemy, still or a lifetime of labor in the eyes of the United States. So they sought basically reclamation restitution. Discontinued during a severe war. The confederacy pointed to these past president s as a legal standing for itself to apply this behavior to block p. O. W. s. So again emphasizing this property principle rather than the idea of legit is messy or a legit its me. So essentially i went through the reference of more than 50 United States regiments in order to find black p. O. W. s. Approximately records of 50,000 men in total. I found at least 2300 men were captured, this is just my initial first few years of research, theyre still more to be done. Of 178 u. S. Siti regiments, theres more to look. Through ive already identified 2300 men who were noted as captured and i found that about 70 of these men survive. More than 1500 men, hundreds escaped, hundreds resistant, and hundreds survived, and outlived confederacy, and were able to use makeup their freedom after the war to enter their own voices into the record, which all talk about. So im using this to complicate ands existing interpretations basically. But one of the main reasons why its been so reason to find black p. O. W. s is because of the prevalence of narratives of white p. O. W. So andersonville, one of those infamous infamous spaces, with very high mortality rates of white p. O. W. s, this visual history culture surviving white p. O. W. s, the knowledge of who they were. White people doubles were codified. Their lives were recorded and their deaths were recorded. They were unknown entity. This is not the case with black p. O. W. s. They were not recorded in the same, ways or followed in the same, ways they were basically reintegrated into the enslave population in the confederacy. So for a lot of times weve had to rely on the records of and reports of what white p. O. W. s went through. Weve had to rely on records from andersonville where we can see this moment of captivity for these man, we can see their sufferings, we get a sense of what theyre going through. We understand their conditions and this really dictated a lot of the post for discussion as well regarding captivity and p. O. W. This and also the suffering away p. O. W. As went through. White p. O. W. s went through an inordinate amount of suffering in these prison camps. Empty as seen by these photographs of men who came out of andersonville who were still star that they basically look like concentration camp victims. That is an indelible memory that has been burned into the minds of americans when it comes to car cyril experiences of the several war. We dont have this for block peeled abuse. To my knowledge there is no existing photograph of a black prisoner of war in captivity. That is something to be reckoned with and weve also had to rely on white p. O. W. s own writings about black p. O. W. s. Some were only getting a snippet of the experience, because theyre contained in these specifics prison sites. Or seen theyre not seeing the vast majority of black p. O. W. s. This is something to reckon with, when we think about how to go beyond certain spaces, to look into different records. One of the reasons why from waiapi a double this, is the fact that so many were able to write memorize 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 the consciousness of americans. This is why its been so hard to really uncover block peeled obvious because we just dont have the same bitten memories in the same visual culture the white p. O. W. Stud. White p. O. W. Is provided a lot of hopeful information, but we cant get it will block keeled obvious had to say about their experiences. White p. O. W. s were contained with black p. O. W. Is in several spaces on, notably charleston, with the 54th massachusetts, but something that came out in the midst of my research was realizing that the majority of black and obvious that we know about from these testimonies, from historians research, were freeman from the north. Men who had not previously been in slave, and were held in these prisons where they were neither free nor and sleigh. They couldnt be exchanged under the terms of the confederacy. They didnt have that right because they were blocked soldiers. Block soldiers were inherently seditious and rebellious and could incite slave insurrection, so they were seen is particularly dangerous. They were experiencing captivity in quite the same ways as formerly enslaved man. This is something a really came defined as i researched this project. This wasnt a period i start off, with this took several years for me to figure out. Basically when i realized, was that freeman have been the most dismal route of black p. O. W. They are also a relative minority. Several hundred men or freeman from the north were in prisons like, andersonville or charleston, a thousands of men who had been formally enslaved were also held captive and also survived. They were subject to military enslavement, to sail and reclamation. In part because the confederacy still owe labor. And the confederacy as a neighbor nation themselves, because their conditions are not change with them entering into the u. S. Territory. Theyre basically building on precedent set by fugitive slave back of 1850, indicating this idea that the uniform of the u. S. Army convert any sort of standing for these men. And so, most of my research has been to follow the paths of these men who entered into prisons briefly and then exited them again. What happened to these men who were removed from the site of the United States, who are removed from the uniforms and return to the enslaved population generally throughout the confederacy . So again, to reiterate, slavery and practices of slavery carried on through the war. There was a lot of consistency and how the confederacy approach their treatment of black prisoners of war. Black p. O. W. , is particularly those who have been previously in slate, use their knowledge of enslavement to resist on an operate within the circumstances of captivity. They were able to make choices in order to survive, difficult joyce is for sure, but those were available to them. This takes me to, how did i even get to this point . How did i start my research . Well i started off with a typical resources that weve had available to us for a very long time, particularly correspondents and policies created by highlevel politicians for example. We have a lot of understanding of policies that confederacy created. So i started here. I started with the official records of the war. And basically realized immediately that there was going to be a difficulty finding these men because theyre not referred to as p. O. W. s. And theyre not refer to a soldier. They are neither slaves captured an arms. They are captured slaves in uniform. These kind of euphemisms were applied to them regularly, so i really had to expand my search to understand what was going on on the ground. So prisoners of war was just not applicable, and basically i started searching through this more than 120 volume collection of correspondents spanning the entire war and found very little and realized quickly i had to go beyond this set of sources that we have been relying on for so long. But i also realized that would Jefferson Davis is saying in 1862, which is a response to the preliminary proclamation of anticipation, the past and january 1863, the black soldiers were going to be a fact and how to deal with them. I think interestingly he makes this argument that these men do have to be delivered to state authorities in order to be dealt with. In or in order with the laws of the states with dealt with support processes, and fair Court Processes as well as execution, this requires essentially keeping these men alive in order to deliver them to the one place, from