About

Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor of History at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on War and Society, particularly the 19th-Century U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction. She is the author of four books, including her most recent work, Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War, which was awarded the 2022 Organization of American Historians Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award. Her other notable publications include The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners of War, which was recognized as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army, a finalist and honorable mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize. She is also a co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War. Dr. Foote is the creator and principal investigator of the Digital Humanities Project 'Fugitive Federals,' which visualizes the escape and movement of 3,000 Federal prisoners of war during the Civil War.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Sociology
• Public administration
• Gender studies
• Art
• Literature

Selected publications

• The Civil War and Its Place in Military History

  The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2025-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: This roundtable discussion among War and Society historians places the American Civil War in a comparative military context. It suggests that the conflict between the Union and the Confederacy was an aberration in the broader military history of the United States and the world. Scholars consider citizenship, Black military service, masculinity, the evolution of the regular army, volunteer and conscript armies, the myth of the decisive battle, guerrilla conflict, the nature of the home front and battlefront, and interservice rivalry. The roundtable concludes with an assessment of the application of digital tools and AI.

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• The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction by John Patrick Daly

  Southwestern historical quarterly · 2023-04-01

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  Reviewed by: The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction by John Patrick Daly Lorien Foote The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction. By John Patrick Daly. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. 200. Illustrations, notes, index.) The War after the War is a concise, bold synthesis of the recent scholarship on Reconstruction. "Reconstruction was a war," John Patrick Daly asserts (4). When Union and Confederate armies demobilized in 1865, there was no clear peace settlement. Ex-Confederate extremists thus initiated what Daly terms "the Southern Civil War of 1865–1877" (2), a campaign of violence to control local and state governments and defeat a biracial southern coalition composed of White Unionists and Black freedpeople. Daly identifies three phases to the Southern Civil War. The first was the terror phase. Ex-Confederates remained in power throughout the South from 1865 to 1867, and they massacred thousands of African Americans and their White allies. In the second phase (1868–1872), after the United States government divided the South into military districts and organized new southern state governments that enfranchised Black voters, ex-Confederate extremists used guerrilla tactics that attempted to overthrow these biracial governments. Events in Texas take center stage in this portion of Daly's narrative, with excellent coverage of Governor Edmund Davis's use of martial law and biracial state forces to battle the insurgents. In the third phase (1872–77), ex-Confederate extremists created paramilitary armies that fought and won open battles against state forces, exemplified by the Battle of Liberty Place on the streets of New Orleans in 1874. Confederates lost their bid for independence and national power in the American Civil War, but ex-Confederate extremists won the Southern Civil War and reclaimed local political, social, and economic power. Daly argues that the types of violence and number of deaths that occurred in these three phases meet the criteria that some political scientists have established for a conflict to be defined as a civil war. His conclusion juxtaposes the Southern Civil War with the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 to bolster his categorization of violence in the American South as civil war. The identification and description of the three phases of violence in the South from 1865 to 1877 is very useful. But Daly does not define "war" in the opening of the book, and this absence is not just a matter of semantics. As a political scientist quoted in the conclusion points out, war involves organized violence, and Daly writes in the final few pages of the book that civil war is "two armed and organized factions (148)." Daly's discussion of the terror that ex-Confederates inflicted from 1865 to 1867 is a litany of massacres, assassinations, and torture; there is rarely mention of Black people and White Unionists fighting back. In the streets of Memphis and New Orleans in 1866, the vast majority of Black people were not armed. Is it war if one side is not organized for the purpose and is not fighting back? It is convincing that a Southern civil war evolved, but if there was a [End Page 587] shift from a one-sided terror campaign to civil war after Black men gained political power in 1868, that timing needs further exploration. John Patrick Daly does not mince words in this short and easily read book. He boldly calls on all Americans to discard false narratives of Reconstruction that remain dominant in popular understanding and to memorialize the true heroes of the period, the Black and White southerners who gave their lives fighting the losing battle to establish a biracial democracy in the South. After reading this book, it will be hard for anyone to maintain the traditional textbook view of Reconstruction. Lorien Foote Texas A&M University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

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• Rites of Retaliation

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2021-10-07 · 1 citations

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  During the Civil War, Union and Confederate politicians, military commanders, everyday soldiers, and civilians claimed their approach to the conflict was civilized, in keeping with centuries of military tradition meant to restrain violence and preserve national honor. One hallmark of civilized warfare was a highly ritualized approach to retaliation. This ritual provided a forum to accuse the enemy of excessive behavior, to negotiate redress according to the laws of war, and to appeal to the judgment of other civilized nations. As the war progressed, Northerners and Southerners feared they were losing their essential identity as civilized, and the attention to retaliation grew more intense. When Black soldiers joined the Union army in campaigns in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, raiding plantations and liberating enslaved people, Confederates argued the war had become a servile insurrection. And when Confederates massacred Black troops after battle, killed white Union foragers after capture, and used prisoners of war as human shields, Federals thought their enemy raised the black flag and embraced savagery. Blending military and cultural history, this book sheds light on how Americans fought over what it meant to be civilized and who should be extended the protections of a civilized world.

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• Massacre

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2021-10-07

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  When Black soldiers of the 54^th Massachusetts, 8th USC.T., and 1st North Carolina clashed with Confederate soldiers at the Battle of Olustee, the ensuing massacre of wounded soldiers escalated violence in the Department of the South beyond the boundaries of civilized warfare. The Confederacy did transfer Black prisoners to its military prison at Andersonville. The US War Department’s retaliation had forced the Confederate government to recognize free-born Black northern soldiers as prisoners of war. Confederate officers and soldiers fighting on the ground and handling Yankee prisoners did not always accept the official policy of the Confederate War Department and committed war crimes that challenged the ability of both sides to restrain war through retaliation. This is exemplified in the Confederate treatment of the body of Col. Charles W. Fribley and the Black prisoners captured at Olustee. Federal Brig. Gen. Truman Seymour did nothing to protect these men. Hatred and rage, rather than honor and restraint, marked military events in Florida in 1864, and many soldiers and officers in the region feared that Americans were losing their claim to a place in the civilized world. The Union response to the massacre at Fort Pillow demonstrated the limits of retaliation.

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• Introduction

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2021-10-07

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  The introduction explains the ritual of retaliation that was used during almost every military campaign of the American Civil War. Combatants negotiated how the laws of war applied to specific campaigns. The Department of the South is the ideal location for study because three contentious issues converged there: Federal recruitment of Black troops, Confederate treatment of prisoners of war; and Federal treatment of non-combatants. Retaliation reflected the desire of the Union and Confederacy to fight a civilized war and the fear that the war was degenerating into savagery. The US Commissioner for Exchange of Prisoners, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, is central to understanding how retaliation evolved.

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• [Untitled]

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2021-10-07

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  Extract This book was published with the assistance of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University. © 2021 Lorien Foote All rights reserved Designed by Jamison Cockerham Set in Arno, Scala Sans, Irby, Gatlin Bold, and Cutright Bold by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Cover illustration: From Harper’s Weekly, March 18, 1865. Courtesy Library of Congress library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Foote, Lorien, 1969– author. Title: Rites of retaliation : civilization, soldiers, and campaigns in the American Civil War / Lorien Foote. Other titles: Steven and Janice Brose lectures in the Civil War era. Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Series: The Steven and Janice Brose lectures in the Civil War era | Includes bibliographical references and index.

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• A Notable Bully: Colonel Billy Wilson, Masculinity, and the Pursuit of Violence in the Civil War Era

  Civil War Book Review · 2021 · 1 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  With his “flair for storytelling,” Cray gives vibrancy to “scholarly conclusions of gender historians regarding the role of violence in nineteenth-century manhood,” Reviewer Lorien L. Foote writes. Foote agrees with Cray’s contention that Wilson’s story is one “’worth knowing,’” and she contends herself that “the story as Cray tells it, is worth reading.”

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• Felons And Outlaws

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2021-10-07

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  After Maj. Gen. David Hunter recruited Black men from the Sea Islands to be Union soldiers and Maj. Gen. John Pope issued orders that targeted the morale and resources of the citizens of Virginia, Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued a retaliation proclamation declaring Union officers to be felons unworthy of treatment as prisoners of war. Robert Gould Shaw, an officer in Pope’s army, exemplified the belief that civilized warfare controlled and disciplined soldiers to minimize violence. When the Confederacy reserved Pope’s officers for hanging in Libby Prison, US general-in-chief Henry Wager Halleck adjusted US policy in Virginia. In the Department of the South, activist anti-slavery Federal commanders deployed the Black 1^st South Carolina on raids to liberate slaves and destroy local resources. Susie King Taylor represented the connection between the regiment and the local Black community. Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon ordered the summary execution of Black men captured in Federal uniform.

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• Campaign for Charleston

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021-10-13

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  Abstract The Union campaign against Charleston and its environs lasted from November 1861 to February 1865. It included a naval blockade, classic siege operations on Morris Island against Confederate fortifications, and the 545-day bombardment of the city. Confederate defenses relied on engineering expertise and technological innovations in the form of torpedoes and submarines. Because Union forces confronted Confederate defenses for such an extended period of time along a lengthy coastline connected to South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the campaign for Charleston had far-reaching effects. It created a refugee crisis, caused the breakdown of law and order, disrupted farming in interior counties, unleashed slave uprisings, and changed women’s relationship to the state. Because the Union occupation of the coastal Sea Islands was stable from the opening months of the war, this campaign featured prominent experiments with military emancipation, free labor, and the recruiting and use of African American soldiers in combat, such as the 1st South Carolina and the 54th Massachusetts, that profoundly shaped the national conversation about emancipation and civil rights.

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• Figures Maps

  University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2021-10-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Earl J. Hess

  1 shared

• Daniel Krebs

  Robert Bosch (Germany)

  1 shared

• William L. Shea

  1 shared

• Thomas J. Brown

  University of South Carolina

  1 shared

• Terrence J. Winschel

  1 shared

• Joan E. Cashin

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2022 Organization of American Historians Civil War and Recon…