When they invested in steamboats, railroads, roads, education, communication routes, and other infrastructure, Feliciana elites advanced the national and global transportation revolution. They used enslaved convict laborers to build railroads and to work on them. Meanwhile, small numbers of immigrants moved there, including German Jews in St. Francisville. They lived alongside free Black residents, a group who also occupied a precarious position. Some free Black people acquired property and exercised limited citizenship rights. This all rested on chattel slavery, and between 1800 and 1860 this region became central to the early republic and cotton production. But in this “Age of Emancipations,” these bondspersons survived, celebrated, and sometimes resisted.

This chapter tracks this region from dominance by the Tunica, Choctaw, and other Indigenous nations until after the Seven Years’ War when it became British West Florida. In that period British officials attempted to build Indigenous alliances and offered land grants to establish plantations until the American Revolution, when Spain invaded and claimed the region for itself. Officials in Spanish West Florida used land grants to recruit settlers and reinvigorated the African slave trade, resulting in a growth in population as well as enslaved resistance.

After Union forces captured New Orleans in spring 1862, they determined to fight their way upriver through the Felicianas to a showdown in Vicksburg. The battle at Port Hudson, known as the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, is remembered as the first time Black men fought as Union soldiers. There they battled bravely but suffered dearly in a victory they hoped would make a new world. The available evidence suggests my ancestor Virgil Harrell did not enlist. But after the war he and other Feliciana freedpersons claimed themselves. In the presence of their enemies, freedpersons named themselves, married, created homes, abandoned homes, voted, and recreated themselves and their communities on land drenched in generations of their blood. They would have to draw on the lessons of slavery to create something like freedom.

Chapter 5 outlines the way in which Plath’s poetry engages with the language and performance of ritual magic. It introduces the concept of ritual magic that employs ritualistic, incantatory language, such as chants, spells, and ritualistic acts. The chapter focuses on two poems, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Burning the Letters’, that engage with the idea of poetic spellcasting and argues that the poems seek inspiration from the ritual of exorcism or banishing spirits. The close reading relies on the drafts of the poems, highlighting Plath’s attribution of magical powers to poetic language that she often erased from the final versions of her poems. The chapter asks how Plath’s poems interrogate what constitutes ritual magic, engaging with the blurred boundaries between mundane and magical rituals and utilising the powers of poetic language.

In July 1866 Rachel Robins and Virgil Harrell married. After centuries of commoditized kinship, my grandmother’s grandfather celebrated citizenship by claiming kin. But emancipated people had a freedom vision that exceeded liberal ideology. As in other post-emancipation societies, many wanted land to become smallholders. They elected John Gair and other Black politicians. At great personal cost, they organized, voted, and armed to defend themselves against vigilante forces. But this couple and others learned the limits of liberal inclusion. Emancipation and enfranchisement set a new stage for an old conflict between people who believed in the power of democracy and those committed to white power over all else.

After a century of colonial fantasies, Americans carved into Feliciana’s red dirt an early republican slave society that produced staples for global markets. Land and laborers in the Lower Mississippi Valley produced sugar and exploding quantities of the raw cotton that powered the Industrial Revolution. Feliciana elites focused on state building, creating a police jury, Overseers of the Poor, and slave patrols. They bought books and newspapers to keep up with global affairs and enjoyed social spaces. Indigenous and African residents, by contrast, unsettled the space as elites created it. Tunica, Choctaw, and other Indigenous nations used the courts to defend their land and traded with increasingly powerful planters. Some enslaved persons fled to nearby cities, Mexico, and the Caribbean. But most survived in place, where they turned slave quarters, swamps, woods, and public spaces into places of complex communion, conflict, and care.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.