Editor’s Note

Capitalism’s relation to slavery, and vice versa, continues to draw great interest from the historical profession. Ever since Eric Williams published his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery in 1944, historians have explored the connection between the two. For a while, studies within southern historiography argued against the notion that planters had embraced the values of capitalism. The future Confederate States were often portrayed as existing outside of the movement toward modernity. More recently, scholars have developed an approach that is being called the New Capitalism: a framework that incorporates the perspectives of the worker and immigrants with that of entrepreneurs and financiers, often situated within the global development of industrialization. With the need, as Seth Rockman explained in a forum held in this journal in 2012, to connect “the stories of New York financiers, Virginia slaves, Connecticut shipbuilders, and Alabama land speculators,” slavery now appears central to the rise of capitalism.¹

Two articles in this issue further explore this realm. Scott Reynolds Nelson provides a very useful tour of the evolving historiography of capitalism and slavery, taking us back to the foundations laid by Eric Williams and tracing the intellectual developments that included such concepts as Marxist theory, modernization theory, transition debates, merchant capitalism, and world-systems theory. In this review essay, he argues that work between 1945 and 2000 has been ignored by more recent scholarship as he ponders: “Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?” Cathal Smith, in a comparison piece, takes issue with accepting the portrayal of nineteenth-century planters from Mississippi and Irish landlords by their peers as backward. Smith believes both planters and landlords tried to modernize their economic behavior to mesh with transformations in global capitalism. “Second slavery” in the United States and “second landlordism” in Ireland revealed these elites as full-fledged participants in the capitalist world, using the tools of a modern economy to rationalize both slavery and estate management.

Two other research articles assume different looks at the problems surrounding the freedom struggle in the North. D. H. Dillbeck tackles the genesis of General Orders No. 100 by Francis Lieber, challenging the argument that emancipation remained central as a concern for its creation. Commonly known as Lieber’s code, General Orders No. 100 established rules of warfare that became a model for other nations. Dillbeck argues that emancipation was not Lieber’s main concern, but rather three other issues were: prisoner exchanges, guerrilla warfare, and parole. Meanwhile, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood exposes the battle against segregation by African Americans in post–Civil War Boston. Although an 1866 state law prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, the issue arose again in the 1880s over the use of roller skating rinks. The article shows the importance of analyzing the meaning of freedom below the national level, where state and local laws determined the day-to-day experiences of liberty and equality.

Leading off the issue is Ari Kelman’s acceptance speech for winning the Watson Brown Prize for the best books published on the Civil War era in 2013. Published by Harvard University Press, Kelman’s book resurrects the battles over interpreting the massacre of Native Americans at Sand Creek, Colorado, during the Civil War. Creating a single narrative that satisfies all parties has been an incredible challenge for the National Park Service in trying to commemorate the fighting. Kelman takes us on a journey that begins with trying to discover the actual site of the killing field and moves to a rumination of how the Civil War embraced different narratives: a new birth of freedom and national redemption for some, but dispossession and subjugation for others.