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  • Editor’s Note

Cultural elements can have surprising influences on the direction and making of history. Each of the articles in this issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era reveals intriguing ways that memory, reputation, poetry, and the pursuit of morality have intersected with legal and political concerns across a wide portion of American life.

Opening this issue, Nina Silber examines Abraham Lincoln’s reputation in the 1930s, during which, she argues, he became a symbol of federal power and racial justice. In her view, he offered a “cultural testing ground” for responding to the economic crises of the Great Depression. The research begins to fill a gap in the chronological studies of memory of the Civil War, which typically stop at World War I. Silber’s remarks came as part of the 2014 Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture at Gettysburg College. Begun in 1962, the lecture series—run by the Civil War Institute and conducted on the anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—has served as a forum for the top historians in the profession.

Two research articles highlight aspects of cultural influences on the legal system and the sectional crisis. In “Black Litigiousness and White Accountability,” Kimberly Welch shows how African Americans in antebellum Natchez used the “politics of reputation” to bolster their credibility and attack white authority in the court system. Welch adds an analysis of rhetorical strategies to the growing trend to feature African Americans not as outsiders from the legal system but as people who understood the rituals of law and, at times, used them to their advantage. Following her, John Frederick Bell adds the voices of the poets to the sectional crisis. Among abolitionists and other poets of the antebellum period, the Compromise of 1850 appears to have ended their ambiguity over the advantages of disunion, with authors adding their cultural weight to the preservation of the Union with honor.

Finally, in a review essay titled “A New Birth of Regulation,” Susan J. Pearson asks us to consider as factors prompting expansion of state power not only social welfare and labor regulations but also crusades against vice, obscenity, and other moral issues. A flurry of state activity occurred after the Civil War, leading to regulation of business, professions, banks, railroads, and more. Pearson argues that “morals regulation advanced social order rather than civil or political rights; it was abundant, popular, and constitutionally supported, and it helped to increase the power and capacity of government at all levels.” [End Page 347]

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