Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction by Gordon C. Rhea

Gettysburg, and Monocacy campaigns, setting the pattern for residents’ cold welcome of rebel columns. Robert W. Schoeberlein examines the patriotic and humanitarian activities of Maryland women, Black and white, including the dangers of Confederate women being charged with disloyalty or subversion. Jonathan W. White examines the complicated process by which a new state constitution achieved slave emancipation in the state in 1864, barely passing amid political and legal challenges from Democratic slaveholders and even former Unionists, then undone almost instantly by the 1867 state election. Sharita Jacobs Thompson examines the fraught transition for African Americans from slavery to freedom to citizenship in wartime and Reconstruction, one that denied the Plummer family the full promise of freedom. Robert J. Cook explores the development of the Lost Cause memory in the state, which celebrated its Confederate experience in such a way that was disproportionate to wartime realities, and which segregated the evolution of the state’s Union narrative by denying African Americans’ participation despite emancipation celebrations, longtime Black veterans’ organizations, and civic rituals such as Memorial Days. Partisan “myth-encrusted narratives,” as Adam Goodheart writes in the foreword, have long offered alternative, reconciliationist distortions of Maryland’s Civil War experience that persist nearly to the present, especially in southern and Eastern Shore counties, mirroring those of other “southernized” border states. This important revision of a state’s Civil War history by a group of talented scholars, appearing at a national moment of reckoning on the impact of Confederate iconography, is timely and welcome.