The Life and Death of Gus Reed: A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Thomas Bahde (review)

Thomas Bahde’s second scholarly work on the wartime Middle West seems, upon first examination, to offer a critical analysis of one man’s experiences as he traveled through the criminal justice system. Gus Reed’s story would make any historian sit up and take note, for it offers insight into what happened to an African American man who made his way out of slavery and into the free state of Illinois. But, as part of the Ohio University Press Series on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest, Bahde’s work examines a much larger and more intricate picture of what historians are just now beginning to understand in full. Reed was a petty thief, but his life ended in the Illinois State Penitentiary at the age of thirty-two. He had been sent to solitary confinement, cuffed to his cell door for two days, and beaten. His punishment for robbing the home of a Springfield attorney resulted in his lungs hemorrhaging as he screamed. He died with a wooden and leather gag harnessed to his face. Although an investigation found the prison guards liable for Reed’s death, they were merely dismissed from duty.

Gus Reed was at once ordinary and extraordinary: a man born in a slave state (Georgia, 1846?) who absconded to a free state (Illinois, 1864). As Bahde explains, the book is not a biography, but a “framework on which to hang a larger story of the evolving relationship between race and justice” (2). The Life and Death of Gus Reed makes some substantive claims about the connections among midwestern whites who might have had ambiguous feelings about slavery and slaveholders, but whose commitment to white racial superiority signaled their belief that free blacks lacked the ability to live under freedom. In the study of race relations, emancipation, and citizenship rights in the Midwest, this is a key point, because it means that while midwestern whites might have had a slightly more sophisticated approach to the “problem” of black settlement, they would still fight mass migration in the form of Black Codes. While white southerners chose outright lynching for their handling of perceived African American criminals, white midwesterners advocated for a merciless penology. Both approaches, as Bahde points out, included torture and dehumanization. In this way, Bahde asks us to reconsider the limitations of newfound freedom. While the question is not necessarily new, each community study that either moves away from the Confederate South and the slaveholding border states or integrates the midwestern or western states promises a more precise retelling of the black experience on a national level.

Bahde organizes his research in a careful manner, using Reed’s life as a gauge for the chronological changes occurring in the Midwest during and following the war. For example, in chapter 1, “Georgia Roots,” he analyzes the changing nature of white supremacy in the South and in the Midwest, as whites and blacks alike continued to battle over the tone and nature of permanent black settlement. Here Bahde offers a statement that a teacher or scholar might use to succinctly sum up the disappointment of black migration: “Had Gus Reed known the troubled history of race relations in his new home, he might have thought twice about staying” (17). The ugly secret of the so-called free Midwest was that few black people in the region had any reasonable access to citizenship rights. As we know from the infamous Dred and Harriet Scott case, slave owners were protected anywhere they traveled in the United States, while even freeborn and freed African Americans lived in constant fear of being sold into southern slavery. Lacking the benefit of Reed’s own voice, Bahde cleverly uses records from emancipation-seeking black groups to help understand how Gus might have...