Isaac Royall Jr. was the largest slaveholder in Massachusetts. At least 60 slaves served on his three estates in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and hundreds more on the sugar plantation in Antigua that was the source of his family’s fortune. Before the American Revolution, he was a member of the Massachusetts Governor’s Council. A bequest […]
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Preserving Southern History: How They Did It in Pocahontas
Last October I wrote a blog post about how Pocahontas, Arkansas, a small town in the rural northeast area of the state, celebrated its 150th anniversary. The celebration covered three weekends, the first of which was devoted to the town’s early history up to and including the Civil War. Because of the current discussion about […]
ShareUncle Billy: The Evolution of a Legend, Part Two
By Carla Rabinowitz on May 15, 2017 in Billy Rubottom, frontier life, Stories and memory, The idea of honor
Another Billy Rubottom story has a third version, less romanticized, a product of the change in sensibilities in our own era. This one concerns the death of Hilliard Dorsey, who was married to Billy’s daughter Civility. Dorsey was a former Confederate officer, like Billy a prominent Mason and community leader. Horace Bell’s portrait is not […]
ShareUncle Billy: The Evolution of a Legend, Part One
William Wiley Rubottom, a California innkeeper and entrepreneur known to everyone as “Uncle Billy,” provided the inspiration for some serious storytelling. Conflicting versions of two of these stories, set down twenty years apart, offer a glimpse of the way in which stories can be used to reinforce the values of a place and time, and […]
ShareA “Hardboiled Hellhole:” Panamint City, California
By Carla Rabinowitz on April 29, 2017 in Bettises, Billy Rubottom, Panamint City, Thomas Stevenson Drew
For the past 20 months, this blog has been following the journeys of the Drew and Bettis families and their descendants across the continent, paying less attention to the characters themselves than to the unexplored corners of American history through which they traveled. We’re now getting to California, the farthest point of their journeys. From […]
ShareThe Rise and Fall of Nicodemus
By Carla Rabinowitz on April 15, 2017 in Bettises, Kansas frontier, Martha Bettis Cooper, Martin Bettis, Nicodemus
In 1878, a newly arrived settler in western Kansas looked over a small rise in the prairie, expecting to see the new, all-black town of Nicodemus rising before her like a beacon of hope. What she saw was a collection of “anthills”—small mounds of sod, some of them with chimneys poking up. She burst into […]
ShareThe End of Reconstruction and the Arrival of the Exodusters
By Carla Rabinowitz on April 1, 2017 in 15th Amendment, African-American voting rights, Exodusters, Kansas frontier, Martha Bettis Cooper
For African-Americans in the former slave states, the promise of the 15th Amendment quickly proved hollow. As the searing experience of the Civil War receded, white America began to focus on reconciliation. This slow and difficult process required a shared narrative of the heroism—white heroism—that had strengthened the bonds of the Union. The newly freed […]
ShareCitizens at Last: Winning the Fifteenth Amendment
By Carla Rabinowitz on March 25, 2017 in 15th Amendment, African-American voting rights, Black soldiers in the Civil War
Nobody “gave” African-Americans the right to vote. They won it for themselves, largely through the tireless advocacy of the black veterans who had helped to win the Civil War for the Union. This is the central argument of Christian Samito’s book, Becoming Americans Under Fire. Samito traces their slow progress towards full citizenship, and the […]
ShareA Community Out of Chaos
By Carla Rabinowitz on March 12, 2017 in Building social capital, Free People of Color, Kansas frontier, Martha Bettis Cooper
Martha Bettis Cooper was a survivor. In spite of the chaos and destruction around it, the city of Leavenworth prospered during the Civil War, and Martha and her family prospered along with it. By November of 1860, about a year after she and her son Drew arrived, she had bought a house lot worth $120. […]
ShareLife at the Edge of the War
On the Missouri-Kansas border, the official outbreak of the Civil War merely resurrected the savage conflict over “Bleeding Kansas” that had paused only briefly a year or two before. As in other parts of the West, the two regular armies had few troops to spare for remote border struggles. The inhabitants were left to settle […]
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