A 19th Century War on Terror A rising wave of racist violence in the South prompted President Grant to take legal and military action against the Ku Klux Klan. Written by Guy Gugliotta Reviewed by Fergus M. Bordewich Wall Street Journal 8 July 2025 Amos Akerman may be the most consequential attorney general you’ve never heard of. Under President Ulysses S. Grant he gave federal teeth to the new 14th Amendment, personally leading a successful judicial battle against the Ku Klux Klan’s war of terror across the Reconstruction-era South.

Mr. Gugliotta narrates the story of the South Carolina campaign in vivid, anecdote-rich detail.  He strangely overlooks the Klan war across the rest of the South, a significant omission which undermines a full understanding of Grant’s policy.  However, he is especially deft when steering the reader through the tangled politics of Reconstruction, making good use of diaries and letters, contemporary newspaper accounts and congressional hearings.

“Unlikely Collaborators: Federick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Promise of America”

The talk will be led by Jonathan White

Location: Draught 55 (245 East 55th Street, NYC)

For our October meeting, our speaker will be Jonathan White, who I [Jim Santagata] first met many years ago at the Lincoln Forum in Gettysburg, and I also saw him deliver a speech in Bryant Park in the summer of 2014, all before we finally had him speak at our CWFMNY meeting in March of 2015, when he spoke on the subject of Lincoln's Last Dream.

Jonathan is currently the Vice President of that same Lincoln Forum, assisting President Harold Holzer in running the three day annual  Gettysburg event that is undoubtedly the premier Lincoln and CW-related event in the US. He is also professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News Virginia, an extension school of the very prestigious College of William and Mary. He has won many awards in the areas of teaching excellence, mentoring, excellence in Research, the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Prize, and the Penn State History Department 's Outstanding Alumni Award. He is the author or editor of 21 books that cover a variety of topics related to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. His recent books include A House Built by Slaves: African-American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (2022); Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade Running, and the Slave Trade (2023); A Great and Good Man: Rare First-Hand Accounts and Observations of Abraham Lincoln (2024); New York City in the Civil War (written with Timothy Orr, 2025) and Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglas on Abraham Lincoln, also 2025. This is the book that will likely be the main  source of his October 20th presentation, titled "Unlikely Collaborators: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Promise of America".   We are all plenty familiar with both of these historic giants, with their beginnings and their rapidly growing relationship, so I see no need to try to provide any explanatory background, but will instead leave all that to Jonathan. 

And now, on to the details of the evening. The meeting will be held at Draught 55, at 245 East 55th Street, and the cost will be $60 per person.   

To accommodate our speaker's travel plans, i.e. to allow him to get back to the airport in time for his return flight to Virginia that evening, this meeting will not begin with dinner, but will begin instead with the start of Jonathan's presentation, at 5:30 PM sharp!  Please do not plan on walking in at 5:30, or you will interrupt the presentation and will delay our carefully planned schedule!!! Everyone should already be seated by 5:30!  I strongly suggest that you aim for an arrival time no later than 5:15PM, recognizing that this is a full 45 minutes earlier than the usual start time of our meetings. 

Dinner will begin after the completion of the presentation and a Q&A period, probably around 6:45PM. If you have any questions regarding these changes, or about any other matters, please don't hesitate to reach out to me for an answer. 

And most importantly, if you plan to attend the meeting, please contact Ann Plogsterth at 212-877-6814, or at plogsterth@aol.com so that we can give the restaurant an accurate count of the number of people to be served. 

I look forward to seeing everyone there, since this will be my final meeting of the year before heading back down south to Sarasota FL. 

The decrepit Russian system based on serfdom showed its weakness in the country’s humiliation in the Crimean War in the mid-1850s. For pro-slavery and abolitionist observers in America, the new reforms of Tsar Alexander II attracted attention as Russia was the first to move to abolition (in the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861).

The talk will be led by Amanda Bellows

Location: Draught 55 (245 East 55th Street, NYC)

And finally, on to our first meeting of this new season! Pictured here is Dr. Amanda Bellows, a US Historian in Comparative and Transnational Perspective. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently a Lecturer at The New School and Hunter College. 

Her book, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination, 

which will be the topic of her presentation, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Global Slavery, in the academic journal Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, Public Seminar, and the books New York Times Disunion: A History of the Civil War and Disunion: Modern Historians Revisit and Reconsider the Civil War from Lincoln's Election to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Her talk covers the abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865, events which significantly transformed both nations, with Russian peasants and African Americans both gaining new rights as subjects and citizens in their respective nations. It is a reminder that the Civil War provided us with so much more than just generals, strategies and battlefields. For some clarity that I would not have otherwise been able to distill from what I've read, I'll offer you this brief summary from the Library Company of Philadelphia, regarding the material in Dr. Bellows'  book as well as further information on her background: https://librarycompany.org/2021/05/10/fireside-chat-american-slavery-and-russian-serfdom/.  

This month's speaker will be Professor Lesley Gordon of the University of Alabama, who also just completed a year as a visiting professor at West Point! She has a PhD from the University of Georgia, and her main research interests include Civil War history, Southern history, Military and Naval history, History of Race, and Gender and Women's history. Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War. 

Location: Draught 55

From Jim Santagata:

I get the sense that this is a complex topic! I've read several book reviews, and I found them difficult to summarize into an interesting paragraph or two as I usually do. So I'm going to do something here that I do not usually do. I'm going to simply copy the description from the University of Cambridge Press webpage, which does a wonderful job of introducing the book, its importance and its uniqueness, and it provides some quite unexpected and fascinating insight into a topic that many of us thought we knew very well... the Zouaves! 

“When confronted with the abject fear of going into battle, Civil War soldiers were expected to overcome the dread of the oncoming danger with feats of courage and victory on the battlefield. The Fire Zouaves and the 2nd Texas Infantry went to war with high expectations that they would perform bravely; they had famed commanders and enthusiastic community support. How could they possibly fail? Yet falter they did, facing humiliating charges of cowardice thereafter that cast a lingering shadow on the two regiments, despite their best efforts at redemption. By the end of the war, however, these charges were largely forgotten, replaced with the jingoistic rhetoric of martial heroism, a legacy that led many, including historians, to insist that all Civil War soldiers were heroes. Dread Danger creates a fuller understanding of the soldier experience and the overall costs and sufferings of war. It sheds light on an understudied topic in American Civil War history, and it explores the lasting and often traumatic impacts that accusations of cowardice had on soldiers. “

The meeting will take place on Monday, July 21, at Draught 55, 245 E 55th St, NY NY. The meeting will begin at 6:00PM sharp with socializing at the bar available from 5:30PM. Please help us to help the restaurant staff to prepare the right amount of food and the best seating arrangement by stating your intention to attend as early as you can. The person to contact is once again Richard Asaro. So if you plan to attend, please contact Richard as soon as possible at RichardAsaro1947@verizon.net, or by phone at 718-894-2946.  

Looking forward to seeing all of you there! 

“Tough Minded Leadership on the Part of the Union”. Villa Moscone

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, June 24, at Villa Mosconi. Our speaker will be Hamish Lutris, who last spoke to the Forum in October 2023, on the subject of the New York Civil War Draft Riots. It was a very popular and well received presentation. 

Hamish is an Associate Professor of History at Manchester Community. He has a Masters in History and is well known for the many exceptionally engaging classes he has taught over the years, presenting programs on wide-ranging historical topics such as Native American History, the Civil War, Scientific History, Social and Cultural History, the World Wars, and the American West. He also worked as an Interpretive Ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park as well as at other premier American historical sites, and he has even led hiking and historical programs in Alaska and other far flung locales! And as much as he is a student of all these topics, he is just as much a student of how to present them, especially to audiences of different and mixed ages, adding invaluably to his effectiveness and success as a speaker.                                           

The subject for his June 24th presentation carries this interesting title: 

"You'll Take Dinner in Hell": Leadership in the Far West Campaign of 1862". 

It entails a discussion of the Confederate Army's ill-fated attempt to bring a force to Colorado in 1862, led by Confederate General Henry Sibley, 

hoping to take over the extensive and newly discovered mineral deposits in the area, as well as establishing a staging area for the Confederates to eventually take California and its new-found gold. The Union forces opposing him were led by Generals Edward Canby and James Carelton, 

General Edward Canby

General James Carleton

who were assisted by the much better known Indian scout Kit Carson in leading a vaillant defense of the American West. During the fighting one of the Texan Confederates is said to have yelled to the attacking Union soldiers that "You'll take dinner in hell!!!", a line reminiscent of one shouted to his outnumbered but courageous Spartan army by King Leonidas in the movie "300" during the Battle of Thermopylae, "Tonight we dine in hell!". But just as at Thermopylae in 480 BC, the Confederate attackers had neither the manpower nor the artillery to make their words stick, and the Union successfully ended their threat. This was clearly one of the lesser-known theatres of the Civil War, but one which Hamish believes deserves more attention, especially from historians interested in leadership in the Civil War. 

The meeting will take place on Tuesday, June 24th, in Villa Mosconi, at 69 MacDougal St, NY NY. The meeting will begin at 6:00PM sharp with a pay bar available from 5:30PM. Please help us to help the restaurant staff to prepare the right amount of food and the best seating arrangement by stating your intention to attend as early as you can. The person to contact is once again Richard Asaro. So if you plan to attend, please contact Richard as soon as possible at RichardAsaro1947@verizon.net, or by phone at 718-894-2946. 

Here is a remionder to schedule your attendance for the upcoming June 24th meeting (see the paragraph near the end of the original announcement below for Richard Asaro's contact information), with the cost of attending set at $60 per person (members and non-members alike).

Besides that, we also need to remind everyone that dues for the new 2025-26 season are now, well... due! This fee too is $60 per person, payable by check made payable to the CWFMNY. If you will be attending the meeting you can bring a check and give it to our Treasurer, David Rothfeld. If you would like to mail your check, address it to David Rothfeld, 120 Bethpage Rd, Suite 301, Hicksville NY 11801-1515. These dues are the funds we use to pay for the travel expenses for the speakers we bring in, so we really count on everyone promptly paying their dues so we know at the start of each year what we can spend in bringing you the best speakers for our gatherings. Thanks!

A talk by Jeffrey Boutwell, who writes:

George Boutwell is a fascinating if under-appreciated figure in American history, having played a central role in US politics for over sixty years.  For this talk, historian and family member Jeffrey Boutwell will draw on his new biography that details George Boutwell's service during the Civil War, including: his important rejection of Southern secession at the Virginia Peace Conference held at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, in February 1861; helping coordinate the delivery of Massachusetts troops and supplies in the first critical months of the war; assisting Abraham Lincoln in preparing the country for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862; becoming the country's first-ever Commissioner of Revenue in 1862-63 to help raise needed resources for the Union war effort; and serving as a Radical Republican member of Congress from 1863-1865, supporting Lincoln's military and emancipation policies.  Copies of Jeffrey's book, BOUTWELL: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy (WW Norton, 2025) will be available for purchase and signing.   For more info, www.jeffreyboutwell.com

The meeting will be held at Draught 55

“The Final Fury and the Last To Die”. We will be treated to a talk by Patrick A. Schroeder. To be held at Villa Moscone in the West Village

Our April speaker will be making his fourth presentation, or possibly his fifth (I'm sorry to have lost count!) to the CWFMNY. In one presentation in particular, which I was fortunate enough to be in NY to attend, he appeared in the wonderfully colorful military costume of the French Zouaves, and it was one of our most unforgettable meetings ever! I'm referring to Patrick Schroeder, the Chief Historian of the National Park Service at Appomattox. 

Patrick was born in 1968 at Fort Belvoir, VA. He graduated Cum Laude with a B.S. in Historical Park Administration from Shepherd College, Shepherdstown, WV, and has an M.A. in Civil War History from Virginia Tech.  In 1993, he wrote Thirty Myths About Lee’s Surrender. From 1994 – 1999 he worked at Red Hill, the Patrick Henry National Memorial and is presently the full-time Historian of Appomattox Court House National Historical Park. During his tenure there he has been one of the most popular speakers in our group's history! Besides his appearance as a Zouave, he has spoken to us about General George Custer's performance at Appomattox and The Myths About Lee's Surrender.  At our 4/22 meeting he will be bringing us back once again to Appomattox, but this time with more somber subject matter. The title of his talk will be The Battles of Appomattox:  The Final Fury and the Last to Die.  It will be an hour-long powerpoint presentation that focuses on the April 8, 1865 Battle of Appomattox Station, and the April 9. 1865 Battle of Appomattox Court House.  The program discusses each battle in detail, with nearly 100 photos and maps, and particularly focuses on the tragic final casualties and deaths before Lee's surrender of his army to Grant. Most non-restricted photos of the signing obscure the faces of the two men of the hour, so I will simply close with clear images of both men as they are best remembered...

The meeting will take place on Tuesday evening, April 22, at Villa Mosconi, at 69 MacDougal St, NY NY. The meeting starts at 6:00PM sharp with a pay bar beginning around 5:30PM. The cost for everyone will be $60 per person. 

Please note: If you plan to attend, you will have to reply to Ann Plogsterth by email, at plogsterth@aol.com, since her phone service still cannot accept voicemail messages (I know because I just tried to leave her a message), and Phyllis, who accepted your messages for the past two months, will be traveling for most of the remainder of April. So if you are reading this, you should have no problem replying to Ann by email until this issue can be resolved. If for any reason this is an issue for you, please have a friend who will be attending the meeting include your name in their email reply to Ann. Please make sure that your planned attendance is communicated to Ann... or we may end up short of chairs, and more importantly, food! !

Hopefully, we will soon all be responding by use of the keyboard anyway, because Tom Fallows is working on "automating" your replies by use of a reply button that will appear directly on the CWFMNY.COM website. I'll of course keep everyone informed about this coming development. 

Meanwhile... I'll soon be back in NY and will see you all in June... Jim

NEW TOPIC CHOSEN BY THE SPEAKER, SEE NEXT EVENT OFFERING

Please join us for our second meeting of 2025, a presentation by Mr. Stan Weinstein on the critical election held at a tough time of the war for Abraham Lincoln: the election of 1864 in which he faced the Copperheads and General McClellan. To be held at the restaurant Draught 55, located at 245 East 55th Street.

The speaker for this meeting will be Stan Weinstein, a former New Yorker who has lived in Manhattan, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Sheepshead Bay, and now lives on Long Island. He attended Brooklyn College where he earned both a BS and an MS in Communications, and then spent 40 years in the advertising business. He has maintained a lifelong interest in History and Political Science, and is presently a member of two CW groups on Long Island. And just as I have been fortunate enough to have enjoyed doing ever since our beginnings in  2009, Stan has delivered presentations to several other CW groups in the tri-state area. 

Stan's topic will be The Presidential Election of 1864, which we all recognize as perhaps the most important election in US history. It was the first US Presidential election held during wartime, which in itself was considered to be a great achievement for democracy! But considering the way the war was going, Lincoln entered the summer of 1864 believing that he would be beaten, and beaten badly! His nemesis? The Union General who contributed greatly to Lincoln's change in appearance from almost young looking in 1860 to aged and battle weary only four years later, George McClellan.

Abraham Lincoln, in 1860, and in 1864... 

And George McClellan, youthful, proud and ever boastful. 

Things looked so bad that some members of Lincoln's Republican Party, in an effort to gain support from groups of voters who would simply not vote Republican, had renamed themselves the National Union Party, and it was this party that nominated Lincoln for re-election. Still, Lincoln's only hope for victory was some major battlefield miracle to change the tide of the Civil War! And it was General William T Sherman who, at what seemed to be the last possible moment, delivered that miracle to Lincoln, making a gift to Lincoln of the City of Savannah, after having already taken Atlanta and completing a historic March through Georgia to arrive at Savannah in the most consequential Union battle march of the entire war. As a result,  Lincoln's 55% of the popular vote was distributed advantageously enough for him to capture 212 of the available 233 electoral votes!  This was the first victory by a sitting President in over 30 years, and notwithstanding the temporary renaming of his party, his election victory signaled the start of a 50 year period of Republican Party dominance. What a perfect subject to be presented the month after my deep look into the early, troubled life of Sherman at February's meeting.  

The meeting will be held on Monday, March 24th, at Draught 55, 245 East 55th St, NY NY. It will begin at 6:00PM sharp with a cash bar from 5:30PM. The cost to everyone, members and non-members, will be $60 per person.  As always, to help with both the seating arrangements and the proper amount of food preparation, PLEASE remember to reserve your seat by contacting Ann Plogsterth, either at 212-877-6814, or plogsterth@aol.com, as soon as your plans are set. And there's no better time than right now!

--

Jim Santagata  

Mobile: 718-930-0611