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What are history's biggest misconceptions? 9 experts reveal what we get wrong about the past
Our team of historians, broadcasters and authors take aim at the most egregious fallacies about the past
Ancient Athenian democracy was democratic There’s plenty to criticise about that ancient approach We wouldn’t recognise the system practised in ancient Athens as democracy in the sense we understand it today. Women did not have the vote, and the entire society depended on a massive slave population to be able to function. Yet in other ways it was also more democratic than our democracies today. Every (male) citizen took an active role in governing the city, and every major decision was taken by a vote involving every citizen who attended. An even more egregious misconception is the idea there is an unbroken link between ancient and modern democracy. Athenian democracy lasted for only around 200 years; since then, through most of the rest of antiquity, the Middle Ages and more modern historical periods, democracy has not been practised. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1155876683wbebready-ecda02a-e1775040845111.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of an ancient Greek orator standing on a raised platform, wearing a robe and laurel wreath, gesturing toward a crowd of citizens and soldiers gathered below. Classical buildings and hills appear in the background" title="Demosthenes, a defender of Athenian democracy in the fourth century BC, pictured in a c1880s illustration (Image by Getty Images)" /> In more recent times, Athenian democracy has been held up as a system to avoid rather than imitate. During debates between the founding fathers about the Constitution of the United States in the 1780s, many argued that “even if every Athenian had been a Socrates [ie very intelligent], Athenian democracy would have been little more than mob rule”. It is only very recently that we have come (again) to admire Athenian democracy, and want to link our own system of government to that ancient ideal. Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick Most people in the past had much shorter lifespans Many people died very young – but many others lived long lives On paper, this seems to be true: today, the average global life expectancy is around 72, whereas for much of the medieval and early modern periods the figure hovered around 30–35. You might think, then, that modern medicine, public health initiatives and better nutrition have all combined to help us live longer than our ancestors. In fact, though there has been a significant improvement in living conditions, the idea that there has been a corresponding increase in lifespan over the centuries is incorrect. The overall life expectancy has risen simply because more of us are living to older ages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1691539942wbebready-f6db793-e1775040973181.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A seated adult in dark clothing cradles a young child dressed in pale yellow, who leans against them as if unwell. A bowl and spoon sit on a nearby table, with a chair draped in green fabric to the right." title="A 17th-century Dutch painting depicts a mother with her sick child. Though infant mortality was high in pre-modern eras, many people who survived childhood lived long lives (Image by Getty Images)" /> It’s important to understand the difference between life expectancy and lifespan. The former is an average – so, for example, if two people are born on the same day and one lives to the age of 80 but the other gets ill and dies before their first birthday, their average life expectancy is 40. Although that is statistically correct, we should be wary of drawing conclusions about typical lifespans. Using such figures doesn’t tell us that all (or even most) people in the past lived shorter lives. For most of the medieval and early modern periods, infant mortality was high due to the prevalence of disease, the lack of vaccines and medical knowledge, poor hygiene and sanitation, and complications from childbirth. But if you made it through childhood, you had a fair chance of living for almost as long as the average person today. There are plenty of historical examples of people living well into their seventies, eighties and beyond. Elizabeth I was in her 70th year when she died, and the Roman author and scientist Pliny the Elder recorded one musician who enjoyed good health until his death at the age of 105. Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster Every war ends at a single moment The consequences of conflict can drag on for years The greatest historical misconception is that wars come to an end neatly, on a specific date, with the signing of an armistice or surrender agreement. No war in history has ever ended happily-ever-after with a sudden return to normality. The consequences of war – famine, displacement, lawlessness and political violence – often last longer than the conflict itself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-514079642wbebready-6a2479b-e1775041054396.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“A group of people gather with copies of The Washington Times, holding up front pages with bold headlines such as ‘GERMANY SURRENDERS’ and ‘WAR IS OVER,’ reacting to news of the First World War’s end" title="Jubilant Americans celebrate German defeat in 1918. As Keith Lowe points out, though, the end of a world war has never resulted in a world fully at peace (Image by Getty Images)" /> The First World War is a perfect example. In our popular imagination, especially in the west, it came to an abrupt end on 11 November 1918. But the guns did not fall silent for long. Popular revolutions soon broke out in Germany, Austria, Hungary and many other places. Turkey was consumed by ethnic and religious violence, and vast battles took place between Poland, Ukraine and the new Soviet Union. Such events created an atmosphere of chaos that lasted well into the 1920s. The same thing happened after the Second World War. Ceasefires in 1945 did not bring immediate peace. Instead, armed groups rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the defeat of Germany and Japan. Political violence became the norm, and full-blown civil wars erupted in Greece, Poland, China and Indonesia, among other places. That period of chaos lasted at least until the end of the 1940s. War is sometimes unavoidable. But if we had a better historical understanding of the long-term consequences, perhaps we would prepare a little better for the period of instability that always comes afterwards. And maybe we would be less eager to embark on war in the first place. Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017) Read more | Is the Eastern Front the forgotten theatre of World War One? History is written by the victors Voices of the defeated often resonate the loudest “History will be kind to me,” said Winston Churchill, “for I intend to write it.” Or such, at least, is the popular paraphrase of a line that Churchill trotted out on numerous occasions, always in jest. In reality, as he must have appreciated, no one gets to dictate how they are viewed by posterity. Nevertheless, the notion that ‘history is written by the victors’ is a persistent one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1175727472wbebready-4a19229-e1775041240806.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white engraving showing a hooded, monk‑like figure offering a bowl and cross to an injured man supported by another. A fourth man in a helmet and holding a spear watches beside a forest stream and small waterfall" title="Welsh leader Llywelyn ap Gruffudd dies, 1282 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Consider a few counter-examples from the broad sweep of British history. Our only narrative source for Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is Gildas, a British monk lamenting the arrival of the invaders. Similarly, when the Vikings were ravaging Europe in the ninth century, the tale of their bloody progress was recorded by their monastic victims. Even the Normans, who produced an abundance of propaganda to justify their conquest of England in 1066, did not get to control the narrative. One of the most insightful portraits of William the Conqueror is the obituary of him penned by an English monk. The king, we are told, “was stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will… In his time people suffered grievous oppression and manifold injuries.” When Edward I conquered Wales in the late 13th century, no one (insofar as we know) celebrated his victory in verse, but Welsh poets did lament the passing of his vanquished opponent, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The voices of the defeated are often the ones that resonate the loudest across the centuries. Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster Vikings drank from their enemies’ skulls Those horned helmets are hooey, too Lurid myths swirl around the Vikings: that they wore horned helmets, drank from the skulls of vanquished foes, and tortured and dispatched enemies by splaying their ribs in the gruesome ‘blood eagle’. It’s all nonsense. We can blame the 19th century for the horned helmets. When translations of the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas were published, that headwear started to sneak into the illustrations. Wagner didn’t help. In 1876, for the first performances of his Ring cycle, costume designer Carl Doepler decided that horned helmets would be just the thing. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-542363271wbebready-344c1a7-e1775041336198.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of three people dressed in Viking‑style outfits, wearing horned helmets and fur garments, each holding a spear and a decorated round shield" title="Warriors don horned helmets in a Wagner opera (Image by Getty Images)" /> The idea of drinking from the skulls of enemies comes from a misreading of an Old Norse verse. That’s easily done, because the Norse wrote fiendishly complicated poetry that was deliberately difficult to unpick. One ode, Krákumál (‘The Lay of Kraka’), features a line about heroes drinking from the “curved branches of skulls”. It’s actually a poetic reference to animal horns, but 17th-century antiquarian Ole Worm translated it as heroes quaffing “from the skulls of those they had killed”. The ‘blood eagle’ is trickier to unpick, but again Old Norse poetry might be the source. The sons of Ragnar Lodbrok (‘Hairy-Breeches’), it was written, murdered the king of Northumbria by cutting his ribs from his spine and drawing out his lungs so that they looked like gory wings. It has been argued that this is a misunderstanding rooted in knottily obscure Old Norse verse, and that no such form of torture was ever perpetrated. The moral of the story? If in doubt, blame poets and costume designers. Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands (Profile, 2024) Pompeii was ‘frozen in time’ Most citizens of the Roman town escaped a violent volcanic demise The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 didn’t happen in an instant. Nor was Pompeii buried in one swift sweep by lava. In fact, there was no lava at all. On the morning of the eruption, a thin curl of smoke rose from Vesuvius. By midday, the volcano had erupted, sending a vast column of smoke, ash and pumice 16 miles into the sky. Pumice rained onto the surrounding towns, and over the next few hours many of their inhabitants started to flee. Sometime after 7pm, the column – now too heavy to support itself – collapsed. This sent a scorching gush of pumice, gas and ash known as a pyroclastic flow hurtling towards Herculaneum. The city was buried beneath 20 metres of volcanic material. There were no survivors. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-918985082wbebready-dc62e0f-e1775041410267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two plaster casts of human bodies lie on a bed of light gravel, one smaller figure close beside a larger one, set against a stone wall" title="Casts of a mother and child lie in the ruins of Pompeii – two of an estimated 2,000 victims there (Image by Getty Images)" /> It wasn’t until 6.30am the following day that the first pyroclastic surge reached Pompeii’s northern walls, sweeping about 200 metres into the city before losing momentum. Then, between 7.30 and 8am, the column above Vesuvius collapsed again – and Pompeii was engulfed. Any people remaining in the city were killed instantly, their bodies locked in a rigid ‘boxer pose’ as their muscles contracted rapidly in the fierce heat. Though many died beneath collapsing structures or from suffocation during the first parts of the eruption, most residents escaped before the final lethal surges; the death rate in Pompeii may have been as low as 10 per cent. The eruption didn’t happen in an instant – and the destruction it wreaked took place over the course of some 24 hours. Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii Read more | Your ultimate guide to Pompeii, plus 8 fascinating facts about the ancient Roman city The North won the American Civil War White racial democracy was not displaced even after Confederate defeat Southern planters lost much when the American Civil War ended in 1865. The North’s victory in that conflict ensured that the Confederacy would never establish a global empire of cotton, and paved the way for emancipation, citizenship for freed people, and the franchise for black American men. Yet white racial democracy was not displaced, even if the slaveocracy was somewhat diminished. For the remainder of the 19th century, white people mounted deadly battles against black voters, business owners and politicians. They raged against the short-lived experiment in full democracy known as Reconstruction until they struck a deal with the federal government to end it. By 1877, the rest of the country had left black southerners and their few allies to defend democracy alone. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1329737646wbebready-3d4918b-e1775041532812.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A rectangular metal sign with white lettering on a dark background that reads ‘WAITING ROOM FOR WHITES ONLY BY ORDER OF POLICE DEPT" title="A Jim Crow-era sign enforcing racial segregation at a railway station in the US South (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even more strikingly, white southern elites won a narrative war that changed Americans’ sense of what happened. Historians call it the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’: an understanding shaped in schoolbooks, monuments and popular media that the antebellum South was a place of romance, not horror, and that there was something noble in the region’s last stand. Secessionists were understood as rebels, not traitors, and freed people as, in the words of future president Woodrow Wilson, “dusky children untimely put out of school”. “Whoever tells the best story wins,” it’s been said. The white South told such a compelling story that they secured Jim Crow segregation by 1900, bringing themselves back into the union on their own terms – and at the expense of black Americans. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University The Victorians were po-faced prudes The queen herself loved to laugh "We are not amused.” These words, supposedly uttered by Queen Victoria, have burdened the 19th century with an unfair reputation for prudishness and humourlessness. Many still characterise the Victorian era as a stiff and solemn time when fun and pleasure were suffocated under a cloud of self-discipline and respectability. This, quite frankly, is nonsense. Fun was a vital part of Victorian culture. Celebrity comedians packed music halls every night, the country’s most popular newspapers brimmed with jokes, and the saying “laugh and grow fat” – the belief that cheerfulness promoted health – was a familiar household phrase. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3321199wbebready-60feebc-e1775041641325.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person poses in a theatrical costume: a plaid jacket with large buttons and a wide collar, checkered trousers, a tall tilted hat, and exaggerated facial makeup, set against a plain background." title="Music-hall star Dan Leno poses in a ludicrously mismatched outfit c1890s, illustrating Bob Nicholson’s point that “fun was a vital part of Victorian culture” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Victoria herself was no exception. Her diaries are packed with things that made her laugh. At one dinner party, she found herself talking to an elderly admiral who bored her with a story about a damaged ship. Hoping to change the subject, she asked after his sister’s health. Mishearing her, the admiral replied: “She’ll be fine, ma’am, when we turn her over and scrape the barnacles off her bottom.” Victoria shook with uncontrollable laughter until tears ran down her face. It’s true that Victorian humour was less coarse than that of earlier generations. Jokes about sex, farts and other bodily functions fell out of favour – in respectable circles, at least – but puns became a national obsession, and the era’s comedians produced plenty of books, cartoons and one-liners that still have the power to amuse. It’s high time we stopped treating the Victorians as solemn bores, and started laughing with them instead of at them. Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University Read more | Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you The Middle Ages were dismal The Renaissance starts here I am continually astonished by how often I hear the medieval period in Europe called the ‘dark ages’. One thousand years of history cannot be dismissed so quickly. This was a period of seminal political developments – of genuine statecraft. It was a period of architectural and visual glories. It was a period of outstandingly rich intellectual achievement. It encompassed the Carolingian Renaissance in the eighth and ninth centuries; the so-called 12th-century Renaissance, another period of great cultural revival and vibrancy; and the late 14th and 15th-century Renaissance. (Indeed, we can blame those latter Renaissance thinkers for the denigration of the earlier Middle Ages: they had a vested interest in making out their immediate predecessors to have been benighted and stupidly dogmatic.) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-526750990webready-9c11477-e1775041787316.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large circular stained‑glass rose window composed of vivid blue, red, and yellow panels depicting religious figures, framed by Gothic stone tracery and pointed arches." title="he c1220 Dean’s Eye rose window of Lincoln Cathedral, a wonder of the Middle Ages (Image by Getty Images)" /> Modern intellectual approaches were developed in the 12th century, pioneered by the scholar Peter Abelard in his dialectical text Sic et non (‘Yes and no’). Abelard also wrote a text called the Ethics, which set the tone for many centuries of ethical thinking; he foregrounded the idea of intention, too, and promoted the dictum ‘Know thyself’. On a more everyday note, the Middle Ages were also not as filthy as often assumed. By the later part of the period, urban authorities in particular were deeply concerned about hygiene, and regulated extensively. The metaphor “standing on the shoulders of giants” is often attributed to Newton, but he was merely quoting a 12th-century philosopher, Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” We should, like Bernard, acknowledge our intellectual debts to our medieval predecessors. Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Oh, Mary! makes a monster of Mary Todd Lincoln – but has history been too harsh?
Mary Todd Lincoln has been much maligned for her erratic behaviour ever since she stepped foot into the White House, and stage play Oh, Mary! leans into that, portraying her as a drunk, cabaret-obsessed drama queen. But the story of the real First Lady is one of enduring tragedy after tragedy
The legacy of US President Abraham Lincoln is beyond reproach: he emancipated the slaves and saved the Union in the American Civil War. That’s enough to enshrine him as one of the best to have ever served in the Oval Office. When it came to his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, however, the history books have been less kind. The First Lady is remembered as a tragic figure with a troubled mental state, which worsened throughout her life as she endured a series of devastating personal losses, including Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. Prone to depression, headaches and tempers, she battled inner demons within and censure without. Her own son had her committed to an insane asylum. While that does not sound like a story filled with laughs, Mary Todd Lincoln has inspired the darkly comic and deeply silly stage play Oh, Mary!, currently playing on Broadway in New York City and in London’s West End. *Warning: spoilers for the stage play ahead * Leaving historical accuracy far behind, it gleefully reframes her as a miserable alcoholic longing to escape her closeted homosexual presidential husband and become a cabaret star. Who was the real Mary Todd Lincoln? Mary Todd Lincoln was the wife of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who served from 1861 to 1865. Following his assassination, she would live for another 17 years, although she was consumed by her grief and deteriorating mental health. Her sad end was the more poignant given that, in her youth, Mary had the makings for a successful role in the political landscape of Washington, DC, thanks to an upbringing that fostered her education, intelligence and social standing. Born on 13 December 1818, she was the fourth child of a wealthy and well-connected businessman, Robert Smith Todd, and Eliza Ann Parker Todd, daughter of a prominent family. Mary lost her mother at the age of six and her father quickly remarried. With a total of 16 children, there was little affection in the Todd household. Yet Mary received an excellent education: her hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, was known as the ‘Athens of the West’ as it had grown into an intellectual and cultural stronghold for progressive thought. She had six years of studies, followed by four more at an elite institution called Madame Mentelle’s School for Young Ladies, where she excelled in numerous subjects, especially French. Read more | Was Abraham Lincoln the greatest US president? How did Mary Todd meet Abraham Lincoln? In 1839, Mary moved to Springfield, Illinois, to live with her sister Elizabeth. As her sister’s husband was the son of a former governor of Illinois, Mary immediately became accustomed to socialising with politicians. One rising star of the Democratic Party, Stephen A Douglas, tried to court her. The man who caught her eye, though, was a country lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. With a dirt-poor upbringing and few prospects beyond a career in politics, he hardly made a fitting match with the accomplished, attractive and ambitious Mary. Yet their shared passions and intellectual pursuits brought them together and the two soon formed a close bond. Although Mary’s family did not approve of Lincoln, the pair married at Elizabeth’s home on 4 November 1842. Over the next 11 years, living in Springfield, they had four sons – Robert, Edward, Willie and Tad – but it was not the happiest of marriages. Lincoln spent long periods of time away from home, either campaigning for office or travelling as a circuit lawyer. Then, in 1850, their son Edward died from tuberculosis at the age of three. Coming less than a year after her father had passed away, a traumatised Mary fell into depression. It would not be the last time. Yet all the while, she proved a crucial partner of her husband’s burgeoning political career, hosting events with influential people and acting as a behind-the-scenes counsel. With her support, he rose to be a presidential candidate for the anti-slavery Republican Party in the 1860 election – where, incidentally, one of his opponents would be none other than Douglas, the man who had unsuccessfully courted Mary. Following Lincoln’s victory, the family moved to Washington, DC, and Mary prepared for her role as First Lady. Was Abraham Lincoln gay? Despite his marriage to Mary, the question of Lincoln’s sexuality has been widely debated with a growing school of thought claiming that he was gay or bisexual. Oh, Mary!’s Lincoln is very much married to Mary for appearances only. In his youth, he was, according to his stepmother, “not very fond of girls,” and had intensely close relationships with several man, particularly Joshua Speed, a partner in a Springfield general store. Before his marriage, Lincoln shared a bed with Speed for a number of years, and they wrote intimate letters to each other. During his presidency, he was said to have shared a bed with his bodyguard, David Derickson. Yet there is no definitive evidence of Lincoln’s sexuality. Such claims have been refuted with the argument that, in the 19th century, it was far from uncommon for men to share a bed in a non-sexual way. His relationships with men like Speed were a clear sign of intimacy, but not necessarily sexual attraction. The debate, therefore, continues. Mary Todd Lincoln as First Lady By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded from the Union and the American Civil War was about to break out. This posed an immediate problem for Mary. As she was born to a slave owner in Kentucky, a state which now straddled the Union North and Confederate South, questions were raised about her loyalty. Indeed, she had a brother and three half-brothers had fought for the South; two of her half-brothers had died for it. Mary, however, opposed slavery and was committed to her husband’s cause. To that end, she visited hospitals and battlefields, supported the Contraband Relief Association – which provided food, clothing, shelter and medical care to freed slaves – and set about sprucing up the White House in order to present a stable, modern government. Those renovations came under attack from the press, who criticised her wild spending habits on the lavish redecorations. Around this time, in another moment of visible excess, she took to stockpiling expensive, glamorous gowns made by her personal dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, who had been formerly enslaved but had forged a reputation as a successful seamstress. Vilified and unpopular, Mary then suffered the tragic loss of another son when Willie, aged 11, died of typhoid fever in 1862. Falling into despair, she did not leave her room for months and so missed the funeral, which was held in the East Room of the White House. Meanwhile, the physical ailments that peppered her adult life worsened, including headaches, mood swings and almost manic fits of extravagant spending. In the years since, Mary’s health has fuelled countless attempts at diagnosis, ranging from bipolar disorder to an autoimmune disease called pernicious anaemia. After her losses, a desperate Mary turned to spiritualism and even held seances in the hopes of reconnecting with her lost children. More loss followed just three years later when, on 14 April 1865 – just as the outlook appeared brighter with the end of the war – Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Mary was sitting next to him in Ford’s Theatre when he was shot in the back of the head. Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln? What happened to Mary Todd Lincoln after Abraham’s death? With her mental health deteriorating in the aftermath of Abraham’s assassination, Mary fled the US – where grief and bad press plagued her – and travelled in Europe for several years. She grew increasingly paranoid about money, despite continuing her excessive spending, and lobbied for a widow’s pension from Congress, which was granted in 1870. The following year, however, she had to endure yet another death: her son Tad, shortly after turning 18. Now in a deep depression, she returned to the US, where her last surviving son, Robert, became extremely concerned about her erratic behaviour. He called for a trial on her sanity that resulted in Mary being institutionalised in 1875, confined to a sanatorium for several months. Even after being released and a second trial declaring her to be sane, the public humiliation was all but complete. After a second escape to Europe, she spent her last years in failing health and living in Springfield once again. On 16 July 1882, aged 63, Mary died of a stroke at her sister’s home, the same building where she had married Abraham almost 40 years earlier. She was buried alongside her husband and three sons in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield.
What is Juneteenth, and why is it celebrated? A historian explains the significance of the holiday today
Each year on 19 June, millions across the US gather to commemorate the day in 1865 when the last enslaved African Americans finally learned of their freedom. Professor Adriane Lentz-Smith explores how the celebrations have evolved over the past 160 years – and the long campaign to have Juneteenth formally recognised as a federal holiday
Every summer, the Juneteenth holiday offers Americans an opportunity to celebrate visions of black freedom in the United States. ‘Juneteenth’ refers to 19 June 1865 – the day that victorious federal troops read out a General Order to the inhabitants of Texas’s Galveston Island declaring that “all slaves are free” – but enslaved people knew the date was a bit arbitrary. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery in the Confederate states more than two years prior, and the ratification of the 13th amendment six months later would end it throughout the US. Emancipation came to the South not as a dramatic, singular event but, instead, agonisingly slowly over space and time. Yet, for all the news that black Texans had passed to each other about slavery and the Confederacy being on the ropes in the years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory, slaveholders in the Confederacy’s western frontier held fast to their regime until the Union Army’s arrival made emancipation enforceable. Within weeks, the more than 250,000 black people enslaved across Texas began seizing their freedom. Within a year, they had begun commemorating it. And by 1900, historian Quintard Taylor notes, Juneteenth had become more widely celebrated among black Texans than the Fourth of July. Read more | Abraham Lincoln: the greatest US president? Resistance through celebration The holiday served as part of freedpeople’s self-fashioning. Juneteenth is now a national American holiday, but it began as a Texas Emancipation Day, conceived and institutionalised by the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Black women’s clubs, churches and civic organisations marshalled resources to secure spaces for public celebration. In Houston in 1872, for example, they purchased 10 acres that they named ‘Emancipation Park’ and began holding annual celebrations. Black residents in Austin did the same in the early 1900s. In these cities and elsewhere, African Americans celebrated with picnics, parades, balls, rodeos and reunions. They honoured their elders who had lived through slavery and recorded their memories so that the experience would not be forgotten – or, more likely, erased. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/PA0MJN-b2f1b9e-e1750347645459.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph depicting a band of African American musicians standing in a wooded area. They are holding various musical instruments, including guitars, a violin and a double bass. There is a Stars and Stripes flag behind them." title="617 Emancipation Day Celebration band, June 19, 1900" /> In celebrating, they were also resisting. The establishment of Juneteenth as a holiday coincided with white southern elites’ violent resistance to the democratic experiment of postwar Reconstruction and their revanchist rollback of Reconstruction-era democracy. Colloquially known as Jim Crow, the system of economic and political exploitation was secured in part by sadistic violence and in part by narrative claim. To make Jim Crow palatable, even desirable, to white Americans across the regional divides, its defenders argued that US slavery was largely benign, enslaved people mostly content, and the antebellum South a white man’s romantic tragedy. Thus, every time black communities gathered in triumph and jubilation, they gave the lie to the claims of Jim Crow defenders. And in preserving freedpeople’s memories and knitting together family histories out of lives oft-defined by family separation, they built archives that preserved harder, but fuller, histories. A national phenomenon Through the 20th century, Juneteenth travelled with black mobility. Neighbouring states had already taken up the holiday, but the world wars and accompanying Great Migration of African Americans out of the US South and into the north and west meant that Juneteenth celebrations spread to cities like Milwaukee, Seattle and Los Angeles. Civil rights work in the 1960s kept the holiday expanding at the grassroots; the organisers of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign made 19 June a day of national solidarity for their march, spurring participants to carry the holiday from Washington DC back to their hometowns. It took hold because of what it offered. Joy – invaluable in social movements as well as in daily life – but also a way to remember, to honour, and to gird themselves for future struggles. WATCH | Inside a Jim Crow asylum View Green Video on the source website Juneteenth’s journey from a local holiday to a national phenomenon tracks the black freedom struggle in the post-civil rights era and underscores its connection to earlier times. By 1980, Juneteenth had become a legislative issue as well as a local celebration. In Texas, a veteran of the civil rights movement, Al Edwards, had successfully shepherded a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday. No small feat, as prizewinning historian and Texas native Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, for a state seemingly more interested in its cowboy mythos than its actual history of fighting two wars (the Texas Revolution and the Civil War) to stay a slave regime. The pressure intensifies Amid a growing call over the course of the 1990s and 2000s to have it declared a federal holiday, other states began recognising Juneteenth. The emergence of the Movement for Black Lives as a response to police violence in the 2010s intensified pressure on both state and the federal governments, but the pressure did not come from younger activists alone. In 2016, educator-activist and local historian Opal Lee launched a walking campaign in cities from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, DC to lobby Congress for the federal holiday she and other civic leaders had been pursuing for decades. As the 89-year-old Lee told a reporter for National Public Radio, the holiday was an offering to her “ancestors” as well as to her “great -great-grandchildren”, her “grandchildren” and her “children”. When President Joe Biden signed the bill finally making Juneteenth a federal holiday in June 2021, Opal Lee was at his side. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? George Floyd’s death made the Juneteenth federal holiday possible. Floyd, a Texas-raised athlete who moved to Minnesota and was suffocated by a Minneapolis policeman, died so public and needless a death that it made the American epidemic of anti-black police violence hard to deny. In the short-lived racial reckoning that followed, activists laid out what they believed the nation needed: a return to robust voting rights; reform of militarised policing; a retreat from mass incarceration; and a vision for economic justice. Instead, Congress offered up Juneteenth. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-2150767015-7035ced-e1750347673444.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="President Joe Biden embraces Opal Lee after presenting the civil rights activist with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024. Biden is wearing a black suit and white tie; Lee is wearing a a white suit and black suit. In the background, we can see attendees of the ceremony and two US flags." title="President Biden Hosts Presidential Medal Of Freedom Ceremony At The White House" /> “A heap of Juneteenths” There was to be no structural change, but perhaps we can look to Juneteenth’s founders as a reminder that countering white supremacist narratives is part of challenging state violence. Many everyday Americans have a hard time contending with slavery, and they shy away even more from thinking through the systems of racialised power and exploitation that developed in slavery’s wake. Juneteenth celebrations offer an opportunity to engage slavery’s histories and legacies, to sit with other people’s memories, to learn, and to find pleasure even in knowing hard things. This will be true and necessary whether the federal government continues to acknowledge the holiday or whether it returns to its vibrant home in the grassroots. Like most celebrations of liberation, Juneteenth marks something powerful and partial. “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths,” one of Ralph Ellison’s characters notes in his follow-up to Invisible Man, an unfinished novel named Juneteenth. “[And] I’ll tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free.” When freedpeople rejoiced at slavery’s end, they did not celebrate America’s triumph so much as they did their own survival. America was a promise yet fulfilled whereas black life was fact. The way they took the fact and beauty of their living and used it to seed a better future, therein lies the story and its inspiration.
Who was the greatest President of the United States in history?
Seven historians put forward their nominations for the most accomplished leader to have sat in the White House
George Washington In office: 1789–97 Party affiliation: none Nominated by: Thomas Kidd, historian and author of Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale, 2022) George Washington was the first president in US history – and I’m nominating him as the best, too. I am basing this on his success as a leader, his ability to negotiate conflict in his administration, and most importantly the example he set for future presidents. Americans at the time of the Revolutionary War were enamoured with the ideal of the virtuous republican leader, in the model of the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus. Washington was no perfect man, of course, and like many elite southern Americans he was a slaveholder. But in politics he came the closest to manifesting the republican ideal of any American president. Washington became president after serving as the commander of the Continental Army during the fight for independence from the British. His leadership of the army was not uniformly positive, but his tenacity ultimately led to a successful outcome. Many suspected he might simply remain in the position as a kind of benevolent autocrat, but he resigned from the army in late 1783, returning to his Mount Vernon home in Virginia. Befitting the respect that he commanded, Washington was chosen to preside over the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where the US Constitution was drafted. Then he became the first president to be elected under that Constitution in 1789, in a unanimous vote of the electoral college. Washington dealt with major political conflicts in his administration, especially between the treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who bitterly disagreed over economic policy and the direction of the new republic. Washington was largely (if not completely) able to rise above the partisan bickering, and always believed that the republic and its leaders needed to manifest consensus for the public good. He assiduously reached out to minority religious groups, such as Jews, to assure them of their place in the republic. Washington was not constitutionally required to step down after his second term, but he did so once again to manifest the ideal of the public servant who did not want or need to hold onto power indefinitely. Read more | Did George Washington have wooden teeth? Abraham Lincoln In office: 1861–65 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Richard Carwardine, historian specialising in politics at the time of the American Civil War. His latest book is Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union (Alfred A Knopf, 2025) In his own era, Abraham Lincoln acquired a mythic status as the ‘Saviour of the United States’ and ‘Great Emancipator’. His death, from a shot fired on Good Friday, saw him canonised as the martyr of the glorious Union. Yet even stripping away the myth, most scholars still rank him the best American president. When Lincoln took office, seven slaveholding states had already launched a separate Confederacy. The American Civil War followed. Inexperienced in executive and military leadership, the wartime president faced sustained criticism but drew on formidable self-reliance and indomitable physical strength. He grew in office. Essential to his power were his tenacious nationalism, strategic wisdom, political shrewdness and skill in communication. The American republic’s unique mission, Lincoln insisted, lay in its ideological freight of liberty and equal opportunity. During the war, his nationalism fused with a deepening religious faith. He came to see that preserving the Union’s cargo demanded emancipating the enslaved, a constitutional amendment ending human bondage, and giving the vote to black soldiers. Read more | The Emancipation Proclamation: Abraham Lincoln's declaration that helped bring about the end of slavery Lincoln shrewdly calculated the Union’s strategic priorities: controlling the rich resources of the upper South; securing international support; pursuing a military plan that played to the Union’s strengths while exploiting the enemy’s limitations; and mobilising the human and natural resources of the country. Leadership demanded the deft handling of the levers of power. He controlled his party and broadened the coalition of Union loyalists. He mastered his cabinet and congress, though he was initially less confident with the military. A strong sense of self-worth meant he rarely stood on his dignity. Equally, his mental fortitude – forged through dark passages of depression – gave him resilience in extreme adversity. Sensitive to public opinion, Lincoln recognised that growing war-weariness threatened the Union cause. In the wiry prose of his memorable public addresses (he used no speechwriter), and in the skilful use of a natural sense of humour, he touched the nerve of ordinary people, believing in their educability through reason. Lincoln is the only president to have wrestled with civil war. Could any other have done it so well? Read more | Alternate history: what if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been assassinated? Teddy Roosevelt In office: 1901–09 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Jennifer Wright, popular historian and author of Glitz, Glam and Damn Good Time: Mamie Fish and the Gilded Age (Hachette, 2025) There were dull presidents… and then there was Teddy Roosevelt. If he had not been the president, he would merely have been one of the most interesting men to ever live. The 26th president was a cattle rancher, a taxidermist, a Brazilian explorer, an amateur boxer, a historian who wrote The Naval War of 1812, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his help in bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Admittedly, he did not end the American Civil War, like Lincoln. But Lincoln did not take a bullet to the chest and still finish a campaign speech, as Roosevelt did. Prior to being president, he was a war hero known for his prominent role with the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. This group of volunteer cavalrymen were comprised of anyone who could ride a horse well. That meant that polo-playing scions of New York families served alongside coal miners and Native Americans. The notion of a country in which all people could thrive, work together and have great open spaces in which to ride would go on to become defining aspects of Roosevelt’s presidency. After succeeding to office in 1901, he increasingly promoted the idea of “a square deal for every man, big or small, rich or poor”. That meant breaking up some of the big business monopolies that had dominated the gilded age and mediating a coal worker strike to ensure the public’s interest was protected (Roosevelt was on the side of the workers). A square deal also meant protecting consumers. In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt lobbied for congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts — the meat portion of that perhaps a nod to the fact that Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle [which depicted unsanitary standards in the US meat-packing industry] had been serialised the previous year before being published as a book in February 1906. Read more | 8 facts you might not know about the White House, home of the president of the United States It was also at Roosevelt’s behest that the Forest Service was created. Roosevelt, who is known as ‘the Conservation President’, was passionate about nature. He used his presidential powers to establish 230 million acres of public land that could not be exploited. His presidency was defined by the notion of creating an America wherein the common man might find prosperity, safety and pleasure. It’s not essential that a president’s personality matches his accomplishments. Plenty of dull presidents have accomplished great things. But Teddy Roosevelt was a rare case where the magnetism of the man matched the grandeur of the office. And look, your kid doesn’t go to bed hugging a James K Polk bear. Franklin D Roosevelt In office: 1933–45 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Iwan Morgan, emeritus professor of United States studies at University College London, and author of FDR: Transforming the Presidency and Renewing America (Bloomsbury, 2022) In guiding the US through the Great Depression and Second World War, Franklin D Roosevelt, or FDR as he was known, transformed the presidency, hitherto a relatively small institution, into the modern office that is the fount of national leadership. Having to overcome physical disability after polio left him paralysed from the waist down at age 39 made his achievements all the more remarkable. Assuming office in 1933 amid the US’s worst slump, FDR failed to effect full recovery until war spending renewed prosperity, but otherwise enjoyed unmatched domestic success. His New Deal programme rescued the banking system from meltdown, enabled industrial workers to form unions that bargained for better pay and conditions, and created a new welfare state. It forged a working-class coalition of urban, multi-ethnic voters that helped FDR to win an unprecedented four terms in office (a two-term constitutional limit was ratified in 1951) and transformed the Democrats into the majority party for the next half-century. Roosevelt’s judicial appointments precipitated a constitutional revolution whereby the Supreme Court eventually accepted federal regulation of private enterprise as valid. An outstanding communicator, he uplifted national spirits through his speeches and broadcasts. Finally, he formed a memorable political partnership with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idealism offset his pragmatism. As wartime commander-in-chief, FDR set spectacularly high production goals for America’s defence industries that ensured the Allies were far better equipped than their Axis enemies. He overruled his generals’ plans for a 1943 invasion of France as premature, then prodded a reluctant Winston Churchill into agreeing the D-Day invasion in 1944. HistoryExtra Academy | Take our four-week course, where you’ll discover everything you need to know about the Normandy landings The driving force behind the creation of the United Nations Organisation in 1945, he nevertheless regarded great power collaboration as essential for sustainable peace. Accordingly, he accommodated Josef Stalin’s demands for Soviet control of eastern Europe to maintain good relations. For critics, this encouraged Stalin’s insatiable expansionism, but FDR saw no alternative with the region already under Red Army occupation. Roosevelt’s sudden death while still in office in 1945 meant that history would never know if he could have pre-empted the wartime alliance’s rapid disintegration and descent into Cold War. FDR’s record has some significant shortcomings, notably his limited advancement of African-American civil rights and his complicity in the worst federal abuse of citizen rights in history in signing an executive order in 1942 authorising relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Nevertheless, his positive accomplishments were arguably far more significant. They justify his remembrance as America’s greatest president. Lyndon Baines Johnson In office: 1963–69 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Clifford Williamson, a lecturer in modern British and American history at Bath Spa University “Power is where power goes,” was the mantra of Lyndon Baines Johnson from his early days as a New Deal bureaucrat and teacher through to his time as president of the US. LBJ, as he was often known, was a commanding and intimidating figure who handed out the ‘Johnson treatment’ in his pursuit of power and change in America. A tall man, he loomed over whoever he was seeking to impress, frighten or cajole into supporting him or his policies. He was a member of Congress from 1937 until 1961; he graduated from the House to the Senate in 1948 and became a majority leader in 1955. His time in Congress would be key to his effectiveness as a president who used procedure, patronage and his powers of persuasion to break the entrenched opposition of, in particular, the southern Democrats. LBJ was selected as the running mate to John F Kennedy in 1960, and was raised to the presidency following the assassination of JFK in November 1963. Almost immediately he proved his effectiveness by breaking the Congressional logjam over tax cuts – and, importantly, a Civil Rights Act which was passed in 1964. Read more | US civil rights movement: 5 landmark events In May he launched his ‘Great Society’, a wide-ranging legislative programme where he claimed, “no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled”. There then followed a slew of initiatives that rivalled in scope the New Deal of his hero, Franklin D Roosevelt, and in many cases surpassed it. Following the violent attacks on the peaceful Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, he would propose the 1965 Voting Rights Act that finally ended the poll taxes, literacy tests and Grandfather clauses that had hindered African-American political participation and enfranchisement. However, following a series of riots across the US (starting in Watts, Los Angeles in 1965), a growing white backlash would soon be palpable. It was something that not even the formidable political talents of LBJ could stem. The crisis was exacerbated by the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam, where it was becoming increasingly evident that the US had become embroiled in an unwinnable war, despite sending hundreds of thousands of US troops. Then, in 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese shocked the US by launching the Tet offensive, a major escalation in the conflict. In the face of spiralling opposition to the war among the American people, Johnson decided not to seek re-election in that year’s presidential election. It was a muted end to what had been a brilliant political career. Ronald Reagan In office: 1981–89 Party affiliation: Republican Nominated by: Jeremy Black, author of books including The Cold War: A Military History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and A Brief History of America (Robinson, 2024) Ability and achievement come in many forms. The innovators and the explorers of the possibilities of politics and government win the most praise. But it is also necessary to honour the stabilisers, and Ronald Reagan, the much-mocked elderly ex-Hollywood actor from California, was one of the greatest. America and the West were in grave difficulties at the end of the 1970s. The Vietnam War and Watergate had hollowed out confidence in American power and politics, and the two oil shocks of the 1970s had destabilised the economy and public finances, contributing to a sense of decline. At the end of the decade, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan took this malaise further. What might have come next was a matter of hazard – and, indeed, in 1983, war between the Soviets and the west came very close. Detente had fallen and the Cold War reheated. Read more | Opinion: the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan Reagan proved an adept responder. Though castigated as a warmonger for his reference to a Soviet ‘evil empire’, and for the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles, he believed in negotiations from strength – a stance that eventually bore fruit in the move towards a reduction of tension from 1985. Just as Richard Nixon had reached out to Chairman Mao, so Reagan responded to Gorbachev. Earlier crises over Poland and Afghanistan were handled through measures short of war – so, for instance, the US supplied armaments to the Afghan resistance but didn’t commit ground troops. The same policy of subversion rather than invasion was employed in Central American countries such as Nicaragua. The fall of the Soviet system suggested that the pressure of trying to match American military expenditure and economic development was potent, more so than the repeated moves into war and use of troops frequently employed by presidents from 1991 onwards. In light of this, Reagan appears more viable as a model than contemporary criticism often allowed for. In domestic policy, Reagan pushed growth and deregulation. The American economy provided a clear contrast with the Soviet one, and was thus a more attractive partner for China. In social terms, Reagan was a libertarian, which would have jarred with the intolerance of many members of the modern Republican party. Charismatic, a great communicator, able to take the pulse of the nation, a good delegator, and a man with a heart… Reagan was an attractive head of state and an accomplished leader. Barack Obama In office: 2009–17 Party affiliation: Democrat Nominated by: Rebecca Brückmann, associate professor of history at Carleton College and author of Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood (University of Georgia Press, 2021) Barack Obama became the nation’s first African American president, 390 years after the first documented slave ship arrived in the continental British colonies. Obama’s identity should not eclipse his effectiveness: he oversaw the passage of urgent economic reforms and the first comprehensive healthcare law since Lyndon B Johnson signed the 1965 Medicare and Medicaid Act. Obama expanded civil rights, reconfigured US foreign policy, and emphasised the fight against climate change. Read more | American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know Obama’s 2008 ‘Yes We Can’ campaign centred his charisma and rhetorical skill. He tapped into widespread dissatisfaction with George W Bush’s administration amid the Iraq War and a worldwide economic recession, promoting a hopeful and inclusive vision of the country. Once elected, he confronted the longest economic downturn since the 1930s. One month after Obama took office, in addition to offering financial ‘bailouts’ for banks and the automotive industry, Congress passed an $800bn stimulus package, investing in infrastructure, education and renewable energy. By the time Obama left office, unemployment had been cut in half. The Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’), his landmark achievement, outlawed health insurance discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and halved the number of uninsured Americans. The Obama administration strengthened civil rights by bolstering equal pay provisions, repealing the anti-LGBTQ ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ military policy, supporting marriage equality, and offering a path to work authorisations for undocumented minors. Confronted by an obstructionist Republican Congress that rebuffed attempts at bipartisan coalition building, the Obama administration increasingly relied on executive orders to effect political change. Obama raised the federal minimum wage, designated national monuments under an Indigenous commission, and cut federal greenhouse gas emissions. Obama’s foreign policy saw the continuation of his predecessors’ military interventionism in the Middle East, which made critics question the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 2009. However, he re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba after 54 years, and he brokered a new agreement on nuclear weapons development in Iran. Most constructive of all was his spotlight on the climate crisis, which enabled the breakthrough 2016 Paris Agreement. In the face of racist threats, birtherist conspiracies and a conservative countermovement, Barack Obama was a remarkably effective president during socio-politically challenging times in the 21st century. Read more | Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
13 famous cowboys and gunslingers from the history of the American Wild West
Saddle up and discover the most famous cowboys who shaped the American Frontier, exploring how their stories intertwined with the broader history of the Wild West
Through the lens of idealised romanticism, the Old West continues to capture the imagination as a wild and untamed frontier ready to be harnessed by those with the determination, courage and grit required to endure it. And despite the dangers – from an unforgiving terrain to the pervading lawlessness – there were great opportunities for a handful of big personalities to make a name for themselves. They robbed banks and stagecoaches, proved their speed and skill with a pistol in a gunfight, and embraced the chaos and change of an era marked by clashes between incoming settlers and Native Americans, farmers and businessman, the past and the future. They are some of the most famous figures in American history: cowboys. What was a cowboy? Symbols of the Wild West, cowboys could be all things, from frontiersmen, ranchers, farmers, wranglers, marshals and, of course, outlaws. It was an identity as much as it was an outright occupation. Beyond the bluster of the ubiquitous anti-heroes of Hollywood movies, their real-life stories provide insight into the broader forces underlying the expansion of the American frontier. Through their deeds, we can see the land disputes, the end of indigenous sovereignty, the rise of the railroad, and the slow march of federal law into a space once thought to be uncontrollable. 13 famous cowboys from the American Wild West Billy the Kid Jesse James Wyatt Earp Butch Cassidy Calamity Jane Wild Bill Hickok Doc Holliday Bass Reeves Belle Starr Black Bart John Wesley Hardin Bill Doolin Charles Goodnight Billy the Kid c1859–1881 Is there any name that evokes the outlaws of the Wild West more than Billy the Kid? Born Henry McCarty, the gunslinger was an orphan by his early teens and quickly turned to crime to survive. He went by a number of aliases, including William H Bonney and Kid Antrim (the latter a reference to his slight build and youthful features), before making his first recorded killing in 1877 at the age of 17. But it would be his involvement in the Lincoln County War in New Mexico Territory that earned him his reputation. This wasn’t just a feud between ranchers, which was common enough across the frontier: it was emblematic of the power struggles in the Old West as cattle barons, merchants and corrupt officials wrestled for control. Billy the Kid’s part in this violent conflict made him something of a folk hero, presented as a young man standing up against wealthy ranch owners and corrupt lawmen. He evaded capture and, even when he was caught and sentenced to death, pulled off daring escapes from jail. His outlaw career would be brief, however. By 1881, Billy the Kid was ambushed and shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett. Dead at just 21 – and having claimed that he had killed 21 men – his premature death arguably bolstered his legacy as a daring outlaw in a land where laws were still being written. Jesse James 1847–1882 Jesse James became a legend as the leader of the James-Younger Gang, along with his brother Frank, which committed audacious bank and train robberies. Born in 1847 in Missouri, James was still a teenager at the outbreak of the American Civil War, but he hastened to join a band of pro-Confederate guerillas. It was after the war his headline-grabbing career as an outlaw began in earnest. The two James boys led their notorious gang on a series of bank, train and stagecoach robberies across the Midwest, and despite their inclination towards violence and bloodshed they were hailed in the papers. James was regarded as a Robin Hood figure. Far from giving to the poor, though, his motivations were more self-serving. Read more | How historically accurate are film portrayals of Jesse James? Still, he could always rely on people hiding him and his gang from authorities. The post-Civil War era left many communities embittered and impoverished, and James capitalised on that sentiment by portraying himself as a Southern hero resisting the oppression of the North. Even when James was killed in 1882 – shot in the back of the head by one of his own men, Robert Ford – he was mourned, while his assassin was condemned as a coward. Wyatt Earp 1848–1929 Wyatt Earp may be one of the most recognisable lawmen of the Old West, but his record was far from clean. Over the years, he was a pimp, a thief and a con artist; he owned saloons and gambled; and he found himself on the other side of prison bars numerous times. From his first law enforcement job in 1870, Earp’s career as a sheriff and deputy took him on many adventures across dangerous frontier towns. But it was undoubtedly his time in Tombstone, Arizona, where his brother Virgil was town marshal, that cemented his place in history. Specifically, it was his role in the Gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881. The Earps, joined by their other brother Morgan and friend Doc Holliday, had been feuding with a gang of cattle rustlers and thieves calling themselves the Cowboys. The resulting gunfight allegedly lasted only 30 seconds, leaving three men dead. In the 20th century, it became the stuff of legend. Read more | Was the gunfight at the OK Corral a major gun battle? The motivation behind the gunfight is still a matter of debate. Was Earp a righteous defender of law and justice or using his position as a means to further his own interests? There is no question that he could be bloodthirsty: after his brothers were attacked afterwards, Earp embarked on what has been called the ‘vendetta ride’, during which his posse killed at least two Cowboys. Either way, the famous shootout is a microcosm of the tensions between law and disorder that dominated the frontier at a time when the line between lawman and vigilante was far from distinct. Butch Cassidy 1866–1908 Butch Cassidy was a leader of the train and bank robbers calling themselves the Wild Bunch alongside his partner Harry Longabaugh, the so-called Sundance Kid. Unlike many outlaws of the time, he had a reputation for being relatively non-violent, preferring to use smarts instead of shootouts. Still, Cassidy (whose real name was Robert LeRoy Parker) found himself pursued by Pinkerton detectives across a landscape rapidly shifting and modernising. By the late 1800s, railroads, telegraphs and federal law enforcement were concluding the lawlessness that had defined the Old West. Read more | Allan Pinkerton: The eye that never slept Seeking refuge, Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled the United States altogether and headed for South America. There, they operated a ranch in Argentina, but also slipped back into their outlaw ways. What happened to them remains something of a mystery. The most common story is that they got cornered by Bolivian soldiers in 1908 and were gunned down. Some less likely claims suggest they escaped and lived out their lives under assumed identities. Calamity Jane c1852–1903 Born Martha Jane Canary around 1852, the legendary Calamity Jane became a frontier icon. Not only was she highly skilled as a shooter and rider – in later life, she appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show – but she bucked the traditional role of women in the Old West. She wore men’s clothing and could take care of herself. Both her parents had died when she was still a teenager, leaving her to look after her fiver younger siblings as they travelled cross country. In adult life, Jane allegedly worked as a scout for the US Army, got involved in long-running conflicts with Native American tribes, and potentially shacked up with one of the frontier’s most revered gunslingers, Wild Bill Hickok. Their relationship would not last long: Wild Bill was shot and killed in 1876, while playing poker. Read more | From the real Calamity Jane to 'Madam Moustache': pioneer women of the Wild West Beyond that, separating fact from fiction when it comes to the life of Calamity Jane is a difficult task. Illiterate, she left behind no written records, but as a result of her fame she did dictate a small autobiographical account in the late-19th century. The stories within were often exaggerated, distorted or completely fabricated. One thing is known: for most of her life, Jane suffered from alcoholism. She spent her last months in Terry, in South Dakota, and died in poverty. Read more | “The motors of the wagon train”: meet the forgotten women who upended gender norms to win the Wild West Wild Bill Hickok 1837-1876 A gunslinger, scout, lawman, and showman, Will Bill Hickok was an emblem of the Old West. Born James Butler Hickok in Illinois, Hickok served in the Civil War working as a scout and spy for the Union Army, earning renown for his sharpshooting and bravery. Post-war, Hickok turned his talents to the wild frontier, where his exploits as a lawman and gambler in Kansas and Nebraska towns cemented his legendary status. As a marshal in Abilene, Kansas, Hickok was known for his steely nerves and deadly aim, but also for his preference to avoid violence when possible. Nevertheless, his career was punctuated by famous shootouts, including a deadly encounter in Springfield, Missouri, in 1865 where he killed David Tutt in what is often called the first “quick-draw” duel. Read more | How wild was the Wild West? Hickok’s fame spread through dime novels and newspaper stories, which painted him as the archetype of the Old West hero. But his personal life was tumultuous. His friendship and rumoured romance with Calamity Jane added to his mystique, as did his reputation as a gambler. Hickok met his untimely (but perhaps unsurprising) end in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876. While playing poker in a saloon, he was shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall, a drifter with a grudge. Hickok’s hand at the time (two black aces and two back eights) has since become known as the Dead Man’s Hand. Doc Holliday 1851–1887 John Henry ‘Doc’ Holliday was not a typical outlaw. He initially trained as a dentist in Pennsylvania, but moved to the Southwest after contracting tuberculosis. The hope was that the warm and dry climate would ease his symptoms. It was while drifting through the frontier towns that he met Wyatt Earp. He forged a friendship with the lawman after saving his life, and followed Earp to Tombstone, Arizona, where he was a major player in the legendary Gunfight at OK Corral in 1881. He would then join Earp on his vendetta ride against the Cowboys. While he maintained a deadly reputation as a gunslinger and canny gambler, much of Holliday’s life was ultimately shaped by his illness. His last years were spent receiving treatment in Colorado, before he succumbed in 1887 at the age of 36. Bass Reeves 1838–1910 The runaway slave who became one of the first black deputy US marshals in the Old West, Bass Reeves was no ordinary lawman. Born into slavery in 1838, Reeves managed to flee from his owners during the American Civil War and went to live among Native American tribes. There, he learned multiple languages and the customs of indigenous peoples, as well as the survival and tracking skills that would be so important in his career. Read more | From slave to real Lone Ranger? The incredible life of black Wild West lawman Bass Reeves In his 32 years as a federal officer, Reeves reportedly killed 14 outlaws and arrested more than 3,000 people all across Oklahoma and Arkansas. Perhaps most impressively, given how ruthless and violent many of the men were that he chased down over the years, he lived to see his retirement and ended his illustrious law enforcement career as a police officer in Muskogee. Belle Starr 1848–1889 Belle Starr, born Myra Maybelle Shirley, became infamous not for large-scale robberies or shootouts, but rather for her association with outlaws. Raised in a relatively prosperous family and educated in a classical manner, Starr’s path into criminality seems to have stemmed from choice rather than necessity. After the American Civil War, during which her brother had died fighting as a bushwhacker, she became involved with the outlaws who would form the James-Younger Gang. Belle, who was a skilled shooter, would wear black velvet and a plumed hat, giving her a strong image. Yet it was after her death that her reputation truly flourished, thanks to the sensationalised nature of her apparent murder in 1889 – shot while riding home on her horse, seemingly with her own gun. The circumstances of her death remain unclear. Was she ambushed and shot by a hidden rival while riding home? Or did her own shotgun misfire? Black Bart c1830–1917 Charles E Boles, better known as Black Bart, was a rather unconventional outlaw. His choice of weapon was not a revolver, shotgun or rifle, but poetry. He would leave behind little verses at the scenes of his crimes. Although he robbed dozens of stagecoaches across California and Oregon in the 1870s and 1880s, Bart earned a reputation as a ‘gentleman bandit’. He would be polite to his victims and never resorted to violence, which distinguished him from other more bloodthirsty outlaws. Read more | From murderous motivations to chivalrous reputations: the fascinating history of highwaymen That said, his prose proves that he could sometimes stray from gentlemanly behaviour. Perhaps the most iconic of his poems reads: “I’ve labored long and hard for bread / For honor and for riches / But on my corns too long you’ve tred / You fine haired Sons of Bitches.” Bart’s criminal career ended in 1883 when he was captured and imprisoned, following a botched robbery in which he dropped his handkerchief. This allowed Pinkerton detectives to track him down. The distinctive combination of his refined manners and poetic flair places him firmly as one of the Old West’s more eccentric figures. John Wesley Hardin 1853–1895 For John Wesley Hardin, violence seems to have been an inescapable part of life. He had been born into a turbulent post-Civil War Texas and killed his first man at just 15, setting the stage for a life defined by bloodshed. Hardin claimed to have killed over 40 men – the real figure is thought to be closer to 20 – often in situations that began as minor disputes, but quickly escalated. His volatile nature and talent for the quick draw made him both feared and hunted. His eventual capture in 1877 led to a 25-year prison sentence, of which he served 17. After his early release, Hardin, now 41, studied law and passed the oral Texas bar examination. His would-be career as a reformed lawyer never took off, however. In 1895, while in a saloon in El Paso, Hardin was shot in the back of the head, and then shot several more times after falling to the floor. His killer, John Selman Sr, had feuded with Hardin; he escaped punishment for the blatant killing. Bill Doolin 1858–1896 Bill Doolin was a founder of a gang of outlaws called the Wild Bunch (not to be confused by the gang led by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Also known as the Doolin-Dalton Gang, they terrorised the Old West in the 1890s with a series of daring bank and train robberies. Unlike the more publicity conscious outlaws like Cassidy, Doolin was known for his proclivity for violence. He took part in numerous shootouts with lawmen and narrowly escaped capture multiple times. Read more | The fight for the American west: how myth obscures reality Eventually, he was caught and imprisoned while in a bathhouse, but managed to escape. Not long afterwards, however, he was confronted by a deputy US marshal and killed with a shotgun. The morbid photograph of his body shows him riddled with holes. Doolin’s story demonstrates how the misdeeds of cowboys evolved as the 19th century developed. Starting with skirmishes over land and horse theft, lawlessness became more organised and ambitious as the expansion of railroads promised bigger rewards. It was a brief period, though, before federal authority gradually imposed order. Charles Goodnight 1836–1929 Decidedly not an outlaw, Charles Goodnight was a legendary cowboy in the truest sense. He was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners for his shaping of the Old West. Most notably, he helped establish the Goodnight-Loving Trail, a major route for driving cattle from Texas to markets in New Mexico Territory. And his innovations, such as the chuck wagon (a mobile kitchen for cowboys on the trail) would transform the way that these drives operated. But not all of Goodnight’s life was peaceful. In his earlier years, he frequently fought against the Commanche both with local militia and as a member of the Texas Rangers, before serving in the Frontier Regiment during the American Civil War. Surviving into his 90s, dying in the late-1920s, Goodnight’s reputation stretched far beyond the era of the Wild West and into the modernity of the 20th century. 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How Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election victory set America on the path to Civil War
Richard Carwardine explains why Lincoln's election victory in 1860 was so important and how he managed to trounce his rivals in the polls...
Q: What was the political prelude to the 1860 election? A: Ever since the drafting of America’s federal constitution of 1787, the question of slavery had given rise to political contention and compromise. In the early years of the new American nation, several northern states adopted statutes of emancipation, while new technology and the international demand for cotton gave slave labour deep roots in the south. Plantation agriculture spread from the Atlantic states into the Gulf region. As a result, slave numbers would grow to four million by 1860. Most Americans deemed that the constitution gave individual slave states alone the right to determine the future of their ‘peculiar institution’. However, the westward movement of settlers and the extension of the nation’s boundaries – through the purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas, and the wresting of California and other parts of Mexico by force – prompted periodic crises over the status of slaveholding in the territories and the new states carved out of them. In 1820 and again in 1850 threats of civil war between North and South prompted compromise, while the Democrats and Whigs – the dominant national parties during the 1830s and 1840s – worked in the main to keep the issue at bay. But in the 1850s it arose again. By then growing intransigence, and each faction’s sense of its moral and social superiority, put political compromise beyond easy reach. Read more | The story of the American Civil War: 32 key moments in the landmark conflict Q: Why does the presidential election of 1860 matter? A: Abraham Lincoln’s victory in November 1860 as the Republican candidate for the White House forever changed the relationship between the American government and the institution of slavery. It wasn’t that Lincoln was the first nominee for the presidency to run on an antislavery platform. Minority parties, alarmed by the increasing entrenchment of plantation slavery, had fielded emancipationists in every presidential election since 1840, and in 1856 the newly formed Republican Party had celebrated a powerful showing on a manifesto committed to containing slavery – a “relic of barbarism” – within existing limits. But the real turning-point came four years later when, for the first time in the history of the American republic, an antislavery candidate committed to putting slavery in the way of ultimate extinction triumphed in the electoral college. Read more | Lincoln and slavery: "If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would" Lincoln’s success prompted South Carolina’s withdrawal from the Union. At a special secession convention on 20 December the state declared she had taken her place “once again amongst the nations of the world”. Within two months, six other states of the lower South had joined her in forming an independent confederacy. The US constitution dictated that the outgoing president, the Democrat James Buchanan, remain in office between the election and Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th president on 4 March 1861. ‘Old Buck’ lacked both the authority and will to defuse the greatest crisis in the nation’s history. Its resolution would depend on the wisdom and courage of his successor. Read more about the transatlantic slave trade: Freedom fighters: the enslaved people who fought for the abolition of slavery 8 podcasts about slavery and the slave trade to listen to right now 7 key questions about the transatlantic slave trade – answered Q: Who were the Republicans? A: Like all political parties, the new Republican organisation was a coalition. Its constituent elements emerged from the fractured politics of the mid-1850s that created a political vacuum by destroying the Whig party and weakening their rivals, the Democrats. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the work of US senator Stephen A Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, opened up to slave-holding settlers a vast trans-Mississippi region previously deemed the preserve of free labour. The immediate explosion of anger in the North prompted state-level ‘anti-Nebraska’ coalitions of disaffected Democrats, antislavery Whigs, independent ‘free-soilers’, and out-and-out abolitionists. At the same time an influx of immigrants, many of them Catholic, prompted a native-born backlash that further strained political loyalties. The emergent Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery provided the policy glue that bound its elements together: radical emancipationists driven by moral purpose, racists determined to found lily-white western settlements, social progressives who deemed the South archaic and stagnant, and opponents of the political influence of southern planters – the so-called ‘Slave Power’ that had allegedly hijacked the federal government. Read more | From Lincoln to Trump: a brief history of the US Republican Party By 1860 the party of ‘Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men’ had broadened its platform to embrace homesteads for western settlers, a protective tariff and a Pacific railroad. The Massachusetts Springfield Republican located its strength in “the great middling-interest class”, men “who work with their own hands, who live and act independently, who hold the stakes of home and family, of farm and workshop, of education and freedom”. Republicans made much of their role as the party of conscience, and as such appealed successfully to ‘nativist’ anti-Catholics, while also winning support within influential communities of Protestant and radical immigrants, above all the Germans. Q: Why did the Republican Party choose Lincoln as its candidate? A: Republican leaders met in Chicago in May 1860 to choose a presidential nominee. Attention focused above all on Senator William H Seward, the former governor of New York, who was widely expected to carry the day. But his reputation for radicalism, recently heightened by a speech depicting the struggle between slave and free societies as an “irrepressible conflict”, put doubts in the minds of Republican managers. Could he win the support of essential conservative voters in those states of the lower North (Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois) who had previously blocked the party’s route to power? Seward’s supporters took comfort from the handicaps under which most of his rivals laboured. Edward Bates of Missouri was too conservative, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania too corrupt, Supreme Court justice John McLean too old, Salmon P Chase of Ohio too radical. But Seward had not reckoned on the dark horse, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s seven open-air debates with Stephen Douglas across Illinois in 1858, in pursuit of election to the United States senate, had won him national attention and, by holding his own against the Democratic ‘Little Giant’, the respect of antislavery voters. More recently, his well-crafted Cooper Union speech in New York City alerted easterners to the intellectual sophistication and moral backbone of a westerner they had not before encountered in the flesh. “He’s the greatest man since St Paul,” a newspaperman declared. “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.” Adamant that to restrict slavery was to sustain the purposes of the nation’s founders and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but insistent on the constitutional rights of the southern states to the protection of their “domestic institutions”, and personally untainted by nativism, Lincoln offered a blend of moral radicalism and legal conservatism that allowed his managers at Chicago to present him as the party’s most reliable hope in the doubtful states. Rational political logic, not luck, secured his nomination. Q: Why did the Democratic Party split? A: Enthusiastic expansionists, the Democrats as a national party had to fashion a policy for the western territories that would minister to the incompatible ambitions of free-soil and pro-slavery settlers. For a time Stephen Douglas’s formula of ‘popular sovereignty’ – leaving the settlers themselves to resolve the issue by a local vote – kept northern and southern Democrats happy. But the doctrine was inherently ambiguous: as a unifying principle it could not survive the civil war between pro-slavery and free-soil settlers in ‘bleeding’ Kansas or President Buchanan’s feeble yielding to supporters of a pro-slavery constitution there. Douglas’s political survival in Illinois and the wider North forced him to turn against the national administration. Even so, as the country’s leading Democrat he expected to win his party’s presidential nomination in 1860. By then, however, influential southerners had jettisoned popular sovereignty and, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Dred Scott case (which declared slave-owners’ property rights sacrosanct), had begun to call for federal legal protection of slavery in the territories. The party’s fraught national conventions saw it split over the issue of a federal slave code, leaving Douglas to fight the election as the candidate of the regular Democrats, and the Kentucky slave-owner, John C Breckinridge, to stand as the representative of southern radicals who stood ready to countenance quitting the Union if they did not get their way. Q: Why didn’t Lincoln run in the South? A: Southern nervousness over the rise of an antislavery party boiled over in the fall of 1859 following the misbegotten attempt of the abolitionist John Brown to spur a slave uprising by seizing the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Horrified southern leaders denounced the ‘Black Republicans’ as fomenters of racial revolution. But the Republicans cast themselves as the genuinely national party, loyal to the intentions of the nation’s founders and true to the interests of the non-slaveholding whites of the South. This was a self-perception reinforced by the polemical writings of a North Carolinian, Hinton Rowan Helper, whose Impending Crisis of the South attributed the condition of impoverished southern whites and the backwardness of their economy to slavery’s corrosive effect on enterprise and opportunity. Read more | When the Ku Klux Klan was a mass movement The book became a mainstay of Republican propagandists in 1860. Southern authorities banned it, while vigilantes murdered or drove out those who preached its doctrines. Lincoln’s party put up candidates in some of the states of the slave border region, and Lincoln himself earned several thousand votes in border slave states such as Missouri and Delaware, but did not risk life and limb in the lower South, where no Republicans appeared on the ballot. Q: Did the Democrats’ schism hand the election to the Republicans? A: Lincoln won the presidency with a mere 40 per cent of the popular vote, seven per cent less than the combined ballots of his two Democrat rivals. But the split in the Democratic Party did not itself deliver the Republican victory, for Lincoln secured clear majorities in almost every free state, including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts and the other populous states where the presidential electors were concentrated. Even as a combined force, the opposition parties would not have won. Lincoln easily dominated the electoral college, with 180 votes to Breckinridge’s 72 and Douglas’s 12. A fourth candidate for the presidency, John Bell, appealing to conservative voters who had lost their political home with the death of the old Whig party, won just 39. More significant than the Democrats’ schism in opening the door to Lincoln’s victory was the Republicans’ success in putting a squeeze on Bell’s Constitutional Union party in the lower North. View Riddle on the source website Q: Did Lincoln’s election warrant the secession of southern states? A: Southern nationalist ‘fire-eaters’ moved quickly to mobilise support for secession from a Union that had elected a ‘Black Republican’ on a purely sectional vote. Jumpy southern whites believed that an abolitionist in the White House would use the levers of government to bring about the revolution that had eluded John Brown. For their part, southern conservatives cautioned against hasty action that smacked of both panic and hubris. As South Carolina led the charge towards separation, a dyspeptic realist, James Pettigru, remarked that the state was too small for a republic, yet too large for a lunatic asylum. Prudent slave-owners pointed out that the Republicans were no immediate menace to the South: the party controlled neither Congress nor the Supreme Court, and Lincoln was anyway no radical abolitionist. They were correct in judging immediate secession a far riskier course than waiting for an overt act of aggression from the new administration in Washington. Southern radicals, however, confident in the Cotton Kingdom’s capacity to sustain itself at home and abroad, exploited the fevered times and carried the day. Above all, they played on fears that the new president would stock the slave-states with federal post-holders – a nucleus of antislavery fifth-columnists dedicated to effecting a political and racial revolution throughout the region. Q: What part did the election outcome play in the coming of civil war? A: War followed upon southern secession because Lincoln, supported by a majority of northerners, refused to concede that any of his fellow countrymen had a constitutional right of withdrawal from a ‘perpetual’ Union, and certainly not in response to a democratic election fairly contested and legitimately won. When in early April 1861 Lincoln sent an unarmed vessel to resupply a federal fort in Charleston harbour, the Confederate batteries opened fire. As Lincoln later put it: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” The war, then, was about the survival of the nation and, in its early stages at least, not about the survival or death of slavery. But the election of 1860 revealed the huge fissure between North and South over their incompatible understandings of the peculiar institution’s future in the republic. That fissure had grown more profound since the annexation of Texas (1845) and the Mexican cession (1848) had raised fundamental questions about the status of slavery in the new acquisitions. The political contention reached its climax in the election of 1860. Whatever the later claims of Confederates and their modern successors, the crisis of the Union of 1861–65 was not about ‘state’s rights’ in the abstract. It was about the apparent threat to the power of the slave states to regulate their ‘domestic institutions’. Read more | What if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been assassinated? No one explained this better than Lincoln himself, a month before his assassination. The slaves, he said, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” The election of 1860 was at the heart of this story. Richard Carwardine is emeritus Rhodes professor of American history at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His books include Lincoln: Profiles in Power (Longman, 2003) This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine
What was a scalawag, and what does it have to do with the American Civil War?
Today, we use the term ‘scallywag’ to describe a distrustful rascal, but it stems from a different word, ‘scalawag’, which has its roots in the aftermath of the American Civil War
Immediately following the American Civil War (1861–1865), during the period known as the Reconstruction era, a new pejorative term came into use. A ‘scalawag’ described a white Southerner who supported the US government’s plan to reorganise the 11 states that had seceded from the Union (the Confederacy). The origin of the word dates back further, to at least the 1840s or possibly the 1850s, when it initially referred to a worthless farm animal. Southern supporters of the Democratic Party and journalists later popularised its association with Southern-born white supporters of the Republican Party during Reconstruction, viewing them as traitors to the South. Reconstruction refers to the period following the civil war that aimed to rebuild the South, integrate freed African Americans into US society and reform Southern states’ governments. It involved federal efforts to enforce civil rights and reshape the political landscape and was opposed by Southern Democrats who resisted changes to their traditional social order. What kind of people were accused of being scalawags? Scalawags came from diverse backgrounds and included Unionists (those who had supported the North during the Civil War), secessionists (advocates of the breakaway Confederacy), former slaveholders and Confederate veterans. Small landholding farmers who had long resented the hegemony of the slave-owning planter class over Southern society, accounted for many scalawags. These farmers had also mostly opposed the region’s secession from the Union. Read more | A battle of wills: why the South lost the American Civil War Reconstruction was welcomed as conducive to their interests and an obstacle to the restoration of the antebellum system of slavery. They were driven by a desire to modernise the South – that is, to remake it in the image of the Northern states. Others were simply opportunistic, seizing the chance to gain power and influence in the new political landscape. How did scalawags differ from carpetbaggers? Carpetbaggers were Northerners who migrated to the South after the Civil War. The term was coined via the popular perception of these newly arrived individuals as carrying their belongings in a simple carpetbag. Despite their negative reputation, carpetbaggers were often professionals and included teachers, merchants, journalists and Union veterans. Many were eager to help rebuild the South and uphold the new freedoms extended to formerly enslaved African Americans by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. What impact did scalawags have? Scalawags were a complex group and though many forged alliances with newly enfranchised African Americans, others held fast to racist views. Nevertheless, they were united in their determination to prevent the resurgence of the Confederate cause. To this end, they built up a formidable voting bloc alongside African Americans and carpetbaggers to ensure the successful implementation of Reconstruction. It’s been estimated that scalawags made up about 20 per cent of the South’s white electorate alone during this period. Read more | Jim Crow in the United States: a brief guide to the racial segregation laws Who were some notable scalawags? Confederate general, James Longstreet, is perhaps the best-known scalawag. Subordinate only to General Robert E Lee, Longstreet fully endorsed Reconstruction. His volte-face provoked the ire of his erstwhile secessionists in the South. Another prominent scalawag was Joseph E Brown, the Confederate Governor of Georgia, who embraced the post-war reality imposed on the South.
The real history of Mary Surratt's controversial role in the Lincoln conspiracy
Mary Surratt’s involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, as seen in the new Apple TV+ series Manhunt, is fraught with controversy and ambiguity. What is the complicated truth about her role in the plot, how much did she know, and was she really guilty?
Mary Surratt is known for her contentious role in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, in 1865. Prior to Lincoln’s murder, Surratt would have been regarded as an ordinary woman living a typical middle-class existence. However, her implication in John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy to attack several members of the Union government – as well as Abraham Lincoln – led to Surratt becoming the first woman to be executed by the federal government in the United States. Now, with the release of Apple TV+ historical drama Manhunt, a seven-part series focussing on the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination at the effective end of the American Civil War and the pursuit of the conspirators by officials including Edwin Stanton, we explore the true story of Mary Surratt’s role in the conspiracy, including the ambiguity as to her guilt. The true story of Mary Surratt’s involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln Mary Surratt, born in the early 1820s, was a widow who owned a boarding house in Washington DC. She had moved there in 1864, after encountering substantial financial difficulties following the death of her husband in 1862. Her boarding house was used by John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators to plot the abduction and assassination of President Lincoln, and by Confederate agents more broadly. However, it wasn’t the conspirators’ use of Surratt’s boarding house as a place to organise themselves that condemned Surratt. Rather, it was her close personal connections to the conspirators, quotes attributed to her, along with her suspicious activity, that established her involvement in the plot. Mary Surratt’s son, John Surrat Jr, was a confidant of John Wilkes Booth, and he introduced Booth to his mother. She saw Booth regularly coming in and out of her boarding house, which became a hive of Confederate activity. Additional evidence against Mary Surratt, in the trial that led to her conviction and eventual death, further cemented her as a figure who was involved with the conspiracy. Read more | Could modern medicine have saved Abraham Lincoln? Professor Rosalind Crone writes that, “In March 1865, on the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration as president for a second term, Mary made a fateful comment that one of her boarders remembered: ‘Something is going to happen to Old Abe, which will prevent him from taking his seat.’” Adding to the evidence against Surratt, a government clerk named Louis J Weichmann, who had been staying at her boarding house, explained that Surratt tried to enlist him in a mission to transport a package to Booth on the day of the assassination, fuelling suspicions against her. Also, during the trial, fellow tavern manager John Lloyd testified that Surratt had asked him to hide prepared firearms on his property shortly before the event. In light of this evidence, the 1865 military tribunal ruled that Mary Surratt wasn’t only tangentially aware of some secretive plot being planned, but was actively involved in aiding the conspirators while being entirely cognisant of their plans. Historians have since agreed. As American historian Kate Clifford Larson argued in a 2009 lecture, “there is no question that Mary Surratt was guilty of aiding and abetting John Wilkes Booth… that cannot be denied and the evidence is so strong against her it’s remarkable.” After being found guilty, Mary Surratt was hanged on 7 July 1865 along with three other conspirators. Her final words are recorded as being: “Please don’t let me fall.” How guilty was Mary Surratt, and was she really a conspirator? While Mary Surratt was convicted and hanged for her association with the conspirators and her proximity to their plot, some modern historians have questioned the true nature of her role in the conspiracy, suggesting that Surratt may not have either been entirely innocent or entirely guilty – but somewhere in between. Ambiguity about her guilt and position as a conspirator primarily stems from the lack of direct evidence linking her to the crime, and the circumstantial nature of the evidence presented at trial. Some historians have it that the quotes attributed to Surratt are vague and open to interpretation, and the contents of the mysterious parcel that she involved Weichmann in transporting are still unknown and could have been entirely unrelated to the plot. Equally, asking Lloyd to be prepared for violence by having firearms hidden could have multiple explanations, such as the fact that she lived in an unstable and chaotic environment. Read more | The real Edwin Stanton: the true story of Lincoln’s secretary of war Additionally, historians have pointed to a lack of motive for Surratt to become involved in such a high-stakes crime. While she was a Confederate sympathiser, the same was true of a significant portion of the country, and her views may have been a reflection of the context in which she lived, rather than a deeply held conviction. Ultimately though, the idea that Surratt had at least some knowledge of the plans, however vague or detailed, formed the basis of the claims against her. As many have noted, regardless of how involved Surratt was, the feverish political and public desire to bring those who were culpable to justice was a substantial factor behind the severity of her sentence. And, with all considered, it seems likely that Mary Surratt occupied a place somewhere between guilt and innocence, meaning that speculation about her role continues to thrive. 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The slave who stole a ship and sailed to freedom
Robert Smalls pulled off one of the most courageous escapes from slavery in history, and followed that by becoming a war hero and trailblazing politician
The steamship slowly drifted across the harbour, as quietly as the paddlewheels slapping against the water and the chugging and grinding of the engine allowed. A fog helped to hide them, and those on board knew it was imperative to stay inconspicuous. They were on a secret and dangerous journey that dark May night, one that could change their lives – or end them. While there were no officers, a man in the captain’s coat and hat stood on the deck. His name was Robert Smalls, and on this stolen ship he intended to sail himself and everyone below decks to freedom from slavery. Smalls had been born into slavery 23 years earlier, on 5 April 1839, to a domestic named Lydia Polite in Beaufort, South Carolina. He actually had it easier, relatively, than the other enslaved children – possibly since his master, Henry McKee, may have been his father – but his mother wanted him to understand the horrors faced by black people in the United States. Her harsh lessons included putting him to work in the fields and forcing him to witness a whipping. Download your essential guide to black British history, from BBC History Revealed Available to HistoryExtra subscribers, join us here The man planning to commandeer a 150-feet sidewheel steamship, the CSS Planter, was shaped by these experiences. He was also one of the best pilots in the harbour, who knew the waters so well that he could navigate the sandbars and shallows even in the dark. This would be handy as his escape would be in the early hours. While his white officers had refused to call him a pilot, instead using the term ‘wheelman’ for a slave, Smalls was plotting to be the captain on his own voyage. He would be escaping Charleston. Family commitments Smalls had been 12 when his master first sent him to the town. Over the years, he worked a number of jobs, from waiter at a fancy hotel to a rigger and stevedore, before being enlisted on the crew of the Planter. Smalls enjoyed being near the water and, what’s more, he was allowed to keep around $1 a week. Showing some entrepreneurial spirit, he also sold fruit, candy and tobacco on the docks, and managed to save $100. He had hoped to use it to buy his freedom. Instead, all hopes laid in escaping on the Planter on the night of 12/13 May 1862. It began when the three officers went ashore – despite going against regulations, they did this often – leaving the slave crew alone. Smalls had been waiting for this moment and told the others to be ready. Only two didn’t stay with him. They got the boiler started, but before steaming for open water the ship had to make a pre-arranged rendezvous, which required heading as slowly and quietly as possible in the other direction. There, they would pick up their families, including Smalls’ wife and children. Read more | The black abolitionists who shocked Victorian Britain It was in Charleston that he had married another enslaved person named Hannah and had a daughter, Elizabeth. While permitted to live together, there was a constant fear that any one of them could be sold at any moment and they would be separated. Smalls approached Hannah’s master Samuel Kingman to buy his wife and child himself. The price was $800, and the birth of their second child, Robert Jr, would only make it more expensive. Hannah agreed with Smalls that their best chance of staying together was to escape, declaring, “I will go, for where you die, I will die.” Close encounters With a total of 16 enslaved men, women and children on board, the Planter turned around and started the most dangerous leg of its journey. If captured, everyone faced severe punishment, if not death, as runaways. The noise and smoke of the engine negated any chance of getting through Charleston Harbor without being spotted, so Smalls knew the ship had to appear as if on a routine patrol. That meant passing four military checkpoints, plus armed gun batteries on the shore, all capable of blowing the Planter out of the water. The reason for this weaponry was that the American Civil War had been raging for 13 months, with Charleston a crucial port for the South. The North had imposed a naval blockade of the whole Confederate coastline, however, so Union ships were anchored just a few miles away. Smalls knew this, since the Planter had become an armed dispatch vessel to carry munitions for the army. At the time of his escape, it had four cannons and 200 pounds of ammunition in its stores. Smalls therefore aimed to escape from slavery, taking others with him, in the middle of a war and in a ship that he could hand over to the enemy. He had spent the last year learning all he could of how the Planter functioned and what signals he needed for the checkpoints. On the night, he dressed in the captain’s coat and straw hat and even mimicked his walk so that he could stand on deck and, from a distance, look the part. The Planter passed three checkpoints – Castle Pinckney, Fort Ripley and Fort Johnson – without incident, but the last checkpoint was Fort Sumter: an intimidating fortress on an artificial island with high walls and plenty of firepower. The rest of the crew wanted to take a wide arc around; Smalls argued this would be more suspicious and sailed right towards it. At around 4.15am, he gave the signal and, a few moments later, received the all-clear. As they sailed on by, he gave a burst of the ship’s whistle as a “farewell to the Confederacy”. There was one last danger. The Union blockade could fire on the Planter, an enemy ship, especially if flying the Confederate flag. Smalls had overlooked this. It was hastily lowered and replaced by a white flag made of bedsheets. The Planter then approached the USS Onward and, after a few tense minutes, Smalls was able to explain what was happening to the amazement of the Union sailors. As the other slaves appeared on deck and started celebrating, he turned over the ship with the words, “I am delivering this war material including these cannons and I think Uncle Abraham Lincoln can put them to good use.” Liberation at last Smalls had delivered more than a ship: he had brought himself, his family and a dozen others from slavery. Newspapers and magazines spread the news of his escape in the North, where he was hailed as a war hero. For capturing the Planter, Smalls received a reward of $1,500. Such was his fame that he met with President Lincoln and may well have inspired the decision to let black soldiers join the Union Army. In the South, a bounty was put on his head. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/10/GettyImages-517392232-049562a.jpg" width="3174" height="2330" alt="Smalls’ efforts to escape the Confederate South on board the CSS Planter attracted widespread press coverage across the North (Picture by Getty)" title="Smalls’ efforts to escape the Confederate South on board the CSS Planter attracted widespread press coverage across the North (Picture by Getty)" /> This was not the end of Smalls’ story, but the beginning of his life as a freeman. And the first thing he did was to join the Union fight. He served in numerous naval engagements, including when he piloted an ironclad (an armourplated warship) and helped remove the mines that he had been made to lay for the Confederates. Ultimately, Smalls distinguished himself enough to be given, fittingly enough, command of the now-USS Planter, making him the first black captain of a ship in US service. Read more | Black British history: a timeline At the end of the Civil War, he chose not to build his new life in the North. Instead, he returned to South Carolina, where he had been enslaved. Learning to read and write, he became a prominent businessman, set up a store for freed people, established a school for black children, and started a newspaper. He also ended his military career with the rank of major-general in the state militia. Black soldiers of the American Civil War Freemen and runaway slaves not only fought for the Union – they fought prejudice within the Union, too When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863, it not only freed more than 3 million slaves in the Confederate South, but it also allowed black men to fight for the North by enlisting in the Union Army. By the end of the war, around 180,000 had joined the army and another 20,000 had joined the navy, forming around one-tenth of Union forces. Those in the army served in segregated regiments, the United States Colored Troops, and while there were certainly tales of extraordinary bravery in battle – such as the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry at Fort Wagner – they tended not to be trusted by white officers to be fighting men. There was also the greater risk they faced if captured by the Confederates, as they could be put into slavery or at least treated far worse than their white comrades. Until an act of Congress in June 1864, black soldiers did not receive equal pay for their service to the Union: they got $10 a month (minus $3 for their uniform) compared to the $13 for white troops. This was a hardship familiar to Robert Smalls, as he was denied a military pension of $30 per month until 1897. Continuing the fight The Reconstruction period after the war opened the door to the political arena to black men for the first time, and Smalls was among the first to walk through it. From 1868, he served in the South Carolina House of Representatives, before becoming a member of the Senate in 1870. By then, he had already shown his willingness to fight for black rights: when removed from an all-white streetcar in Philadelphia in 1864, he organised a mass boycott that led to integration on public transport within three years. As a politician, he helped draft a new state constitution, founded the Republican Party of South Carolina, and campaigned for social services and education. In 1874, Smalls was elected to the US House of Representatives, and served a number of non-consecutive terms. But the promise of Reconstruction that black people could find a place in the US as citizens able to vote – encapsulated in the 14th and 15th Amendments – was shortlived. White southerners stripped away black rights, introduced restrictive laws, and launched attacks on black politicians. Smalls faced trumped-up charges of corruption and bribery for which he was sentenced to three years in prison, although ultimately pardoned. Read more | Britain's black trailblazers: 7 pioneers who changed British history Disenfranchisement was all but complete by the end of the 19th century, so it was in one of his last acts before losing his political position that Smalls spoke at the South Carolina constitutional convention of 1895. His words: “My race needs no special defence, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.” That optimism never deserted him, nor his kindness. What better proof of that than the house in Beaufort where Smalls lived out his days until his death in 1915, aged 75. He had bought it shortly after the Civil War, and he would occasionally have an elderly woman suffering from dementia come to the door believing that she lived there. That house had formerly belonged to Henry McKee, his former master, and that woman, who Smalls welcomed in and cared for, was McKee’s wife. The legacy of slavery in the US is deeply painful and traumatic, but, in more ways than one, Smalls managed to escape. This article first appeared in the September 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
Gone with the Wind: how a 1936 novel explains modern America
Sarah Churchwell discusses the controversial legacy of Gone With The Wind and what it can reveal about American history and culture today
Professor Sarah Churchwell discusses her new book The Wrath to Come, which re-examines the controversial legacy of Margaret Mitchell’s immensely popular 1936 novel Gone With The Wind. Speaking with Rachel Dinning, she considers what it can tell us about American history and culture today, from the mythmaking that sprung up following the Civil War to the origins of modern debates over racism and the far right in the United States. Sarah Churchwell is the author of The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells (Apollo, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones