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1 month ago | 
americanheritage.com | Joseph Connor |Edwin Grosvenor |Elizabeth R. Varon |Fergus Bordewich
As April 1865 neared, an exhausted Abraham Lincoln met with his two top generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to discuss the end of the Civil War, which finally seemed to be within reach. Nevertheless, the president—“having seen enough of the horrors of war”—remained deeply conflicted.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
wsj.com | Fergus Bordewich
Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was a surprising instrument of emancipation. Although raised in Ohio and firmly wedded to the Union cause when the nation erupted into civil war, he was a racist who disdained abolition and shunned the use of black troops in his army. Yet, as Bennett Parten shows in his fast-moving account of Sherman’s epic March to the Sea and its legacy, the hard-fighting general brought about the greatest liberation of enslaved Americans in the nation’s history.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Fergus Bordewich
Naval warfare is rich with dramatic episodes. One such that deserves to be much better known is the campaign waged by England in the early 19th century against African slavery. Among the contestants was a sleek, two-masted clipper ship, the Henriqueta.
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Fergus Bordewich
As we experience what seems like a rerun of the Cold War—with Russia once again a hostile dictatorship—it may be hard to remember that Russia and the U.S. were once warmly supportive of each other in the great drama of emancipation. At roughly the same time, in the early 1860s, the U.S. liberated nearly four million enslaved black Americans, and Alexander II of Russia freed some 23 million serfs.
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Jun 7, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Fergus Bordewich
Historians generally treat Reconstruction as an era whose aspiration, drama and importance are confined to America alone. And little wonder: In the decade after the Civil War, the U.S. embarked on a dramatic departure from the prewar status quo, especially in the South. It included a radical attempt to broaden rights, expand electoral participation, and give a new emphasis to equality in nearly all aspects of society and law.
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Fergus Bordewich
In 1872 John Lynch became the first African-American from Mississippi to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served four terms. He later moved to Chicago to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Jim Crow. There, in 1930, he served as an adviser to the first African-American to be elected to the House in the 20th century, Oscar De Priest.
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Jan 5, 2024 | 
wsj.com | Fergus Bordewich
In May 1870, John W. Stephens, a white state senator closely allied with black voters, was lured into the lumber room of the stately courthouse in Caswell County, N.C. Inside, members of the local Ku Klux Klan were waiting. They demanded that he renounce the Republican Party. When he refused, they strangled him and then stabbed him in the heart for good measure. On the floor above, the noise of a Democratic Party meeting muffled the sounds of his murder.
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Dec 28, 2023 | 
lawfaremedia.org | Anna Hickey |Fergus Bordewich |Jen Patja Howell
Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Between 1865 and 1872, the first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan conducted a reign of terror across the former Confederate States, harassing, intimidating, and murdering freedpeople and their white allies. As violence spread with impunity across the South, Congress, at President Ulysses S.
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Nov 24, 2023 | 
starnewsonline.com | Fergus Bordewich
The 1980s and early 1990s saw a spate of books on the subject of Why the South Lost the Civil War or Why the North Won. Several authors noted other countries had suffered worse military defeats than the Confederacy -- the Poles, say, or the Vietnamese --- yet carried on underground resistance until achieving independence. The historian C.
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Nov 5, 2023 | 
latimes.com | Fergus Bordewich
On election day, Nov. 7, Americans will vote for thousands of candidates for public offices — governors, state officials and legislators, mayors, a multitude of county and town supervisors. Their elections will be run by an army of poll workers, many of them citizen volunteers who receive only token payment for their efforts. They will open the polls, check voter lists, monitor voting machines and count votes.
