On Sept. 15 assistant history professor Justin Behrend published an article in the New York Times’ Opinionator blog.
Behrend was approached over the summer to write the article as part of the New York Times’ series Disunion. Disunion is a blog with articles from historians following various episodes throughout the course of the Civil War. The blog serves as a timeline with discussions of the war posted in chronological order.
“We’re in the midst of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War,” Behrend said. “Each blog posting is published to match up 150 years after the event.”
The article, titled “Rumors of Revolt,” centered on the city of Natchez, Miss. during the Civil War. It follows the largest slave insurrection scare in American history in which almost 200 slaves were executed and many more tortured.
In “Rumors of Revolt” Behrend wrote that, “In the early months of the Civil War, no one knew what course the fighting would take, or if rumors of emancipation would be borne out … When they did arrive, six months after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the slaves revolted, but not as planters had imagined,” he said. “They ran away by the thousands, enlisted in the Union army and joined the fight for their liberation and the destruction of the Confederacy.”
Behrend concluded that the only justification for the slaveholders’ cruelty was overheard loose talk among slaves.
“At a deeper level the episode is about struggling to find meaning in what the war is about,” he said. “The slaves were testing the boundaries of permissible subordinance; it was not suicidal resistance.”
Behrend explained that he discovered the events of Natchez while researching his dissertation. This past February he published a more detailed piece on the same topic through The Journal of Southern History. According to Behrend, the Times article is “A short story of a longer piece for a different audience … a quick grasp of recent discovery and interpretation.”
Behrend said he is also in the process of writing a book on the region of Natchez. The book, which treats the region as a sort of case study, follows the events of the Civil War and after emancipation, as former slaves created their own democracy in the area as citizens and even held office.
According to Behrend, however, after 15-20 years of African-American independence in Natchez, white Americans used violence to dismantle that democracy. He is still writing his book titled Reconstructing Democracy: African Americans in the Making of Democracy in the Post-Civil War South.
“Why did we fight the Civil War? Essentially the war was about the future of slavery,” he said. “We can’t understand our past without understanding the centrality of slavery.”