Reporting from the SHA: “Sanitation, Statistics, and State-Building in Reconstruction America”

This panel at the 2019 Southern Historical Association meeting looked at certain policy and bureaucratic efforts during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods. The panelists were Judith Giesberg (Villanova University), Evan A. Kutzler (Georgia Southwestern State University), and James Kopaczewski (Temple University). Kate Masur (Northwestern University) presided over the panel and comments were given by Kate Masur and Fay Yabrough (Rice University).

Judith Giesberg’s paper, “‘A Muster Roll of the American People’: The Making of the 1870 Census and Postwar National Sovereignty,” examined how the 1870 census was different than previous counts of the population. The census was already well-established by this point and it was used politically in the period before the Civil War, but by 1870 it seemed more accepted by the population (maybe a result of the increased bureaucracy caused by the Civil War). When the 1870 census was counted the numbers seemed lower than expected, and there was less growth compared to the previous census. One possibility was the impact of war; the numbers of soldier and civilian casualties and the result of displacement could account for the lower numbers. Even with that impact, the numbers seemed off because freedmen and women should have been counted in the census for the first time, adding millions of new people to the rolls. Giesberg analyzes how the 1870 census opened up inquiries into the disenfranchisement of African Americans during Reconstruction. If all freedmen were counted in the census, the population of the South should have increased (even accounting for the casualty rates of the war), and this would have actually strengthened southern representation in Congress (these men and women would be counted as themselves instead of counted under the 3/5 rule). This could result in more southern Democratic power, unless black men voted (which usually went to support the Republican Party). James Garfield, chair of the Census Committee in the summer of 1869, studied disenfranchisement tactics that particularly targeted African Americans. House Bill 424 proposed adding questions about disenfranchisement to the census; the bill did not pass but the same questions were brought up in the debates leading to the passages of the 15th Amendment, so two questions were added to the 1870 census. This census collected information about disenfranchisement and there were also efforts to research state laws to help instruct men on their rights to vote. Interestingly enough, Giesburg said that the studies found that Missouri, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were the worse states in terms of disenfranchisement. A lot of information was collected with the 1870 census but there was no reapportionment in Congress due to the numbers of men who reported being denied the vote. The census did bring a lot of attention to the issue during Reconstruction, however, and Giesburg makes a connection between the census and the civil rights established during Reconstruction. She also pointed to a connection today as we go into a year with both a census and presidential election.

“‘Seeing like a State,’ Smelling like a Sanitarian: The Landscape of Health in Civil War Prisons” by Evan A. Kutzler examined how Civil War prison camps were organized bureaucratically to manage inmates but also felt the impact of the Sanitarian movement to combat illness. He explained how prison camps were laid out in grids similar to a city which allowed the officials to manage daily life and stop attempts at resistance. Looking at drawings of these camps, especially aerial sketches, they look organized and utopian. In reality, prison camps were unclean, smelly, and the close quarters helped the spread of disease. The Sanitary Movement, with groups such as the Sanitary Commission, criticized the unhealthy environments of prison camps. To reformers, a smelly environment was a diseased environment, a widely held idea in society, and they believed that unhealthy environments needed to be drained, ventilated, and deodorized to create clean and healthy spaces. While some of the more involved measures were not put into place in camps, such as sewer systems, camp officials did try to ventilate barracks, use whitewash to deodorize, and drain privies and standing water. You see these changes largely in Union prison camps—in comparison to camps such as Andersonville—and photographs provide visual evidence of the impact of this movement. The stress on health and environment reflected and foreshadowed other changes in the nineteenth century.

The final paper by James Kopaczewski was titled “‘The Seed of Robbery…Reaps Its Harvest of Blood’: Placing Grant’s Peace Policy within Reconstruction America.” This paper looked at the “Indian question” under Grant’s administration, where Grant tried to establish peace with Native Americans who had grown wary of interventions from the United States. The man in charge of Indian Affairs, Elias Parker, looked to key parts of contraband policy during the Civil War and Reconstruction—proselytization and placing freedmen under missionaries in the transition to freedom, education, and compulsory wage labor—and translated them to Native policy in the post-war period. Grant’s peace policy hoped to uphold treaty obligations and create peace in the west, but often times these were policies of erasure in practice and usually the U.S. Army forced Natives onto reservations. After Parker resigned from the position, Francis Walker took the post (the same Walker as in Giesberg’s paper on the 1870 census); he had no experience with Native affairs, tried to used statistics to quantify and fix the “Indian question,” and refused to send money directly to missionary organizations. Criticism from other officials and resistance from the Natives themselves undercut Grant’s Peace Policy and by the mid-1870s forced assimilation and reservations were the new norm, supported by the failure of peace and the use of Walker’s statistics to argue that Natives were naturally going extinct.

In Yabrough’s comments she tied these papers together as unintended consequences of the Civil War, where you see Civil War policies and practices used elsewhere. For Kutzler’s paper, she asked what it meant that Sanitarians connected the conditions of wartime prisons to later cities and used similar techniques to combat unhealthy environments in those urban areas. For Kopaczewski’s paper, she found the connection between contraband and Indian policy interesting, especially the goal of citizenship. Contrabands wanted citizenship, but Natives did not have that goal since they wanted to remain connected to their individual tribes. For Giesberg’s paper she questioned whether a factor in the undercounting of freedpeople was a reluctance on their part to complete the census due to misunderstandings of its purpose or mistrust. She also discussed the connections to today that Giesberg started to talk about in her paper. Masur added in her comments that the papers demonstrate cases where there is a mismatch between what a state wants and what they can actually accomplish. She also saw a theme of counting, and how the state tries to see, count, and control the population. The 1870 Census was one example, as was Walker’s statistics of Native populations being used to promote the idea that Native Americans were disappearing. Much of the audience discussion focused on Giesberg’s paper with questions about disenfranchisement after 1870 and making connections to 2020.

Dr. Kathleen Logothetis Thompson earned her PhD in Nineteenth Century/Civil War America from West Virginia University, and also holds a M.A. from WVU and a B.A. from Siena College. Her research is on mental trauma and coping among Union soldiers and she is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled War on the Mind. She currently teaches history at several colleges and university and leads tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Kathleen was a seasonal interpreter at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park for several years and is the co-editor of Civil Discourse.