Although a lesser known figure in the political history of the Civil War era, James M. Ashley had a distinctive impact on the national scale of Reconstruction. Ashley was a prominent Radical Republican in Congress and is best known for introducing the bill that became the Thirteenth Amendment and initiating the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. As Chairman for the House Committee on Territories from 1861 to 1868, Ashley also used this position to pilot some of the earliest legislation for Reconstruction in the South while concurrently incorporating several territories in the trans-Mississippi West. Ashley and his collaborators approached Reconstruction with an eye for expanding land, resources, and wealth; a process that ultimately produced a more exclusionary and violent nation. A re-examination of historical actors like Ashley reveals how the federal vision for state restoration in the South and state formation in the West were interrelated national projects.

Historians are increasingly interested in Reconstructions of the West, but Native-led Reconstructions are rarer still. The Cherokee Nation led its own Reconstruction after the Civil War, providing a useful case for bridging southern and western reconstructions. Cherokee Reconstruction was concerned with many of the same problems as that of the United States, but it took place within an Indigenous context, controlled by an Indigenous republican government. This western Reconstruction turned "radical" in 1875, with the election of the uncompromising Charles Thompson, who would attempt to force radical egalitarian reforms at the expense of Cherokee ex-Confederates. These controversial reforms would in turn cause the death spiral of Cherokee Reconstruction, which ended with his first and only term in office. For this reason, I have selected Charles Thompson as a useful historical figure to highlight at this panel. 

Born enslaved in Arkansas, Katie Rowe saw Indian Territory as a place of unique opportunities and new beginnings for freedpeople during Reconstruction. Marrying Billy Rowe, a freedman born enslaved in the Cherokee Nation, in 1884, Katie lived with her husband east of Tahlequah, because he “had land in de Cherokee Nation.” With land to work and facing significantly less violence than in the former Confederate South, Katie recognized the new opportunities her family was able to enjoy: “All my chillum and grandchillun been to school… and I know we living in a better world.” Rowe’s life offers a window into differences in federally-enacted Reconstruction policy in the U.S. West & South.

During the Civil War, Robert Coleman escaped slavery in Kentucky and joined the U.S. Army, playing a direct role in destroying slavery and forcing the United States to begin addressing long-standing questions about race and citizenship. Disillusioned with the limited gains of Reconstruction in the South however, Coleman found refuge in military service in the West. Soldiering and eventually settling in New Mexico and Texas offered Coleman new avenues of mobility and autonomy, but it also ensnared him in expansionist projects that perpetuated dispossession and exclusion for other marginalized groups in the region. An examination of Robert Coleman’s life illustrates how processes of both freedom and unfreedom unfolded simultaneously across time and space in the South and the West during the post-Civil War era.

Few enslaved people covered more American terrain than Biddy Mason. Born in Georgia in 1818, Mason was forcibly transported across the length of the continent – first to Mississippi, then to Utah, and finally to Southern California in 1851. There, she labored in bondage for nearly five years, despite California’s constitutional ban on slavery. Finally in 1856, Mason won freedom for herself and 13 others in the largest freedom suit in the history of the American West. She then began a remarkable rise up the socioeconomic ladder of early Los Angeles, as a nurse, midwife, philanthropist and real estate entrepreneur. She died in 1891, having helped build the core of what would become one of the largest, most prosperous Black communities in the country. Mason’s personal journey blurs the boundaries between South and West, and reveals the transcontinental dimensions of some of the major issues of 19th century America: slavery, freedom, and the long struggle for Black civil rights. You can learn more at The Biddy Mason Collaborative.