Sandra Gunning

“Expanding the Black Civil War: Gender, Sexuality, Community”

Confederate volleys against Fort Sumter, South Carolina in 1861 inaugurated not only the American Civil War, but also the still unabated urge to derive meaning from the conflict. Today avid commentators include academic and lay historians, novelists, Park Service rangers, private tour operators, K-12 educators, re-enactors, filmmakers, bloggers, and even far-right conspiracy theorists. Though politically diverse, their versions of the war are almost always white. Thankfully a few scholars have generated field changing studies confirming that Black soldiers fought in every theater of war; that the labor of enslaved persons fueled the Union war effort; and that Black women were vital participants behind Union lines. And yet, these academic social histories have inadvertently homogenized Black civil war experience and expression.“Expanding the Black Civil War” attends to Black civil war writing in the first person (e.g., extant diaries, letters, journalism, and autobiography) not merely as data-rich sources of everyday experience, but as self-making practices, akin to Foucault’s “technology of the self” and the autobiographical impulse in early African American writing. Across four chapters I examine the lives and letters of Black men and women who, while participating in the Union cause, also confronted unacknowledged histories and impossible choices. Hidden in plain sight, their perspectives further our understanding of the heterogeneity of antebellum African American communities in the North. Writers under discussion include Charlotte Forten, David F. Dorr, Addie Brown, Rebecca Primus, and James Henry Gooding.

Sandra Gunning is a Professor of American Culture and Afroamerican & African Studies.