Editor’s Note

Today it sounds strange, if not outrageous, but serious discussion once existed over whether to create a segregated zone in the United States for the relocation of African Americans. This so-called internal colonization movement, according to one such plan raised in 1865, would have created a territory for black people out of contiguous land in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. One person dismissed the plan as a “strange hallucination,” and it obviously went nowhere. Nicholas Guyatt traces the strange career of this idea, indicating that it had appeared in the United States’ earliest days and circulated even after the Civil War.

The collision over ideas—and the analysis of which ones become policy and which ones do not—runs as a theme through many of the articles in this issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. The discussion opens with the acceptance speech by John Fabian Witt, winner of the Tom Watson Brown Book Award for the best book published in 2012. Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History details the way law, and a code of conduct for warfare, played a strong role in how the conflict unfolded. Law, Witt says, shaped a story usually told through bullets and the Springfield rifle. Chandra Manning takes a fresh look at contraband camps, revealing how the encounters between African Americans—particularly women—and army officers created new ideas about obligation, reciprocity, and rights. And Michael F. Conlin conducts the most comprehensive analysis to date about the ideological siege in which many southerners envisioned themselves against “isms”—among them Mormonism, Transcendentalism, abolitionism, and socialism. But Conlin argues that this sense of an assault on gender relations, law, private property, and even the Bible was not only a southern phenomenon but also was shared by northern conservatives who saw “isms” as part of a program imported from Europe.

In a review essay, John Craig Hammond continues to explore the United States in a wider world as he charts how the country forged an empire for slavery in the century from the Seven Years’ War to the Civil War. In doing so, he argues that scholars can gain an appreciation for the continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and see African American history within the broader hemispheric struggle for freedom.

Ideas about the Civil War continue to come into play in our contemporary lives. Assessing the state of the sesquicentennial in representing slavery, abolition, and Reconstruction, Jill Titus sees considerable progress from the way these issues were neglected during the centennial. But she sees challenges ahead in shaping the public understanding of the conflict in public commemorations. For instance, how can we deal with the “crushing realities of the slave market,” and how can battlefield parks attract more African American visitors? More work lies ahead in this regard.