Cooper Wingert

Cooper Wingert’s research and writing explore the American Civil War, slavery and emancipation, and the 19th century United States, with a particular interest in how Americans negotiated the functioning of power and authority on the ground. 

His current book project charts the wartime precursors to the Freedmen’s Bureau. It illuminates how enslaved people saw opportunity in the chaos and confusion of wartime federal authority, using their experience with law and legal knowledge to push the Union Army’s provost marshals, or military police, well past the technical limits of federal antislavery policies enacted in Washington. 

Dr. Wingert has also written extensively on the antebellum US, the Underground Railroad, and the coming of the Civil War. His June 2023 Journal of American History article, “Fugitive Slave Renditions and the Proslavery Crisis of Confidence in Federalism, 1850-1860,” demonstrates how free Black and white Northerners crowded into federal hearing rooms and pressured their neighbors serving as federal commissioners to deviate from the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act’s harshest provisions. As the article argues, the federal government’s inability to vigorously enforce the 1850 law shook slaveholders’ faith in slavery’s security within a decentralized federal system and served as a chief justification for secession by decade’s end. As a companion to his article, he created a digital history project mapping the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. He is also the author of several books exploring the Civil War history of his native Pennsylvania, including Slavery and the Underground Railroad in South Central Pennsylvania. His next project, The Upper-Ground Railroad, explores the not-so-hidden history of the Underground Railroad during the 1840s. His scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Friends of the Missouri State Archives. 

He is currently assistant director for the National Park Service project Slave Stampedes on the Southern Borderlands, which explores group escapes from slavery, often called “stampedes” by contemporaries. He also served as assistant editor of the National Park Service’s forthcoming Underground Railroad Interpretive Handbook. He is eager to work with students interested in public history and the digital humanities.

Cooper Wingert's CV