The American Civil War Museum has named Beyond Freedom’s Reach its 2015 Jefferson Davis Book Award winner! The award honors “historical research and writing on the origins, life, and legacies of the Confederate States of America and the American Civil War.” Thanks to the distinguished panel of judges and the American Civil War Museum.

It might seem incongruous that a book about a black woman’s quest to rescue her children from bondage during the Civil War should receive a prize named for the President of the Confederacy, but I accept it as a sign that times have changed for the better in Civil War studies.

For more information, see the announcement from the Society of Civil War Historians.

I’m thrilled to report that the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities has named Beyond Freedom’s Reach as a 2016 Book of the Year!

Here’s the announcement of the 2016 Bright Lights Award Winners:

Today is the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by the states on December 6, 1865. This is the day that Georgia ratified the amendment, giving it the necessary approval of three-quarters of the states. Here is the famous text of the Section 1 of the amendment:

“Neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime; whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

I cannot let this anniversary pass without noting that despite the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, Rose Herera’s three children remained slaves in Cuba, where they had been taken by their owners in January 1863. The Thirteenth Amendment didn’t extend as far as Cuba, which was not within the United States and not subject to its jurisdiction. It did not free her kidnapped children.

The fate of Rose Herera’s children became an international affair when Herera’s lawyer, Thomas Jefferson Durant, appealed to Secretary of State William Seward to help his client. “Her children have now been kept from her for three years,” Durant wrote to Seward on New Year’s Day 1866, “and in her name I earnestly invoke the aid of your department to redress one of the most grievous injuries that the crimes of a departed system have left evidence of.” (Report, 48)

It would take the resources of the State Department, and the pressure of a frightening rumor that newly freed people were being kidnapping and sold into slavery in Cuba, for Rose Herera to get her children back…

I spoke about Beyond Freedom’s Reach at the 2015 Louisiana Book Festival on October 31, 2015. My talk aired on CSpan2’s BookTV. Please watch it if you have 30 minutes to spare. Click on the image below.

On Monday, September 28, I gave a talk on Beyond Freedom’s Reach for the Washington History Seminar of the National History Center. Stephanie Kingsley smartly tweeted the talk, and I have collected her tweets here.

Beyond Freedom’s Reach was favorably reviewed by Professor Carol Wilson in the Summer 2015 edition of the Civil War Book Review. Read the review here.

I wrote this piece for Zócalo Public Square, using Rose Herera’s story to explain the difference between abolition and emancipation. 

Today’s Document from the National Archives is a fascinating petition from a free woman of color in New Orleans named Marguerite Thompson, who asked the U.S. Provisional Court to confirm her status as a free person in June 1863.

I tweeted a short analysis of the petition and Storified the tweets. Here they are:

One aspect of Marguerite Thompson’s petition that drew my attention is the fact that she submitted her petition to the Judge Charles Peabody’s U.S. Provisional Court (USPC). This court was established by the United States after Union forces seized New Orleans in 1862. Legal scholar John Gordan writes that “the most legally dramatic of the Provisional Court’s activities was its granting of manumission petitions by slaveholders.” (See Gordan’s article, “New York Justice in Civil War Louisiana,” Judicial Notice 8, p. 20)

As Gordan reveals, one of those slaveholders who appealed to Judge Peabody to manumit his slaves was the lawyer Thomas Jefferson Durant, who later represented Rose Herera in her quest to recover her children.

You can read more about Rose Herera’s and other enslaved and freed women’s own efforts to use the courts to secure freedom for themselves and their families during the Civil War in my book, Beyond Freedom’s Reach.

In the days after the massacre of nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a team of scholars including Chad Williams, Kidada Williams, Keisha Blain, Melissa Morrone, Ryan P. Randall, and Cecily Walker assembled a marvelous bibliography intended to “provide valuable information about the history of racial violence in this country and contextualize the history of race relations in South Carolina and the United States in general.” They compiled the bibliography from Tweets that used the hashtag #CharlestonSyllabus, following the model pioneered by my inspiring Georgetown colleague Marcia Chatelain after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Emanuel AME Church opens its doors on Sunday, June 20, 2015. (Bryan Snyder/Reuters.)

I am profoundly saddened that it has taken a crime of such enormity to awaken many people in our country to the struggle against the symbols and practices of racism, but I am heartened by the idea that we should look to history to help us understand the present and fight for a better future,

I am gratified that Beyond Freedom’s Reach has been included in the #CharlestonSyllabus, and I wish to express my thanks to the scholars who have done the important work of compiling this resource.