Richards Center assistant program director, Dr. Hope McCaffrey, and graduate research assistant Erica Croft recently interviewed Dr. Jonathan Jones, Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University.

Hope McCaffrey: We are so excited to have Professor Jonathan Jones joining us today to talk about his book, Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and America’s First Opioid Crisis, published in 2025 by the University of North Carolina Press. The book was shortlisted for the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln prize. Dr Jones is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University, and he was an inaugural postdoctoral scholar in Civil War history at the Richards Center from 2020 to 2021. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Jones

Jonathan S. Jones: Thanks for having me.

HM: We were wondering if you could start by talking about the origins of the project and what drew you to this subject.

JSJ: Absolutely. I’ve always been interested in the Civil War, particularly in what happens after the Civil War, kind of the post-Civil War period. And so I knew, from the deep origins of my career as a scholar, I knew I wanted to work on Civil War veterans. But the project that became my book, Opium Slavery, originally was my dissertation project, and it actually came about by accident. When I was working on a not totally unrelated project, about Civil War veterans but not on the topic of drugs and substance use, I kept finding in the primary sources these offhand references to things like “morphism” and the “morphine habit,” and I couldn’t get those out of my head.

So, I stepped away from that original project, and I spent a few years away from graduate school. When it came time to come back and pick a dissertation topic, those sources were still lodged in my brain, and I could not get them out of there. Meanwhile, the opioid crisis, the ongoing opioid epidemic that in our time, dates back to the 1990’s, really started to heat up in terms of media coverage. And so, putting the two together, I realized that a lot of what I was seeing on TV and hearing on the radio was strikingly, eerily similar to what I was seeing in the primary sources coming out of the 1860s and 70s and 80s. And so that’s what motivated me to really dive into this project. And from there, it spiraled out of control.

Erica Croft: Can you tell us a little bit more about the story you wanted to tell?

JSJ: Yeah, I wanted to tell two sort of narratives, right? And I wanted to blend them as seamlessly as possible. I wanted to tell a story about opium, the substance of opium from which opiates and opioids are originally derived. And so I knew that that was going to involve doing things like figuring out where opium came from in terms of the nineteenth-century U.S., how medical doctors prescribed opium, what they knew about the concept of addiction, and how those things evolved across the long civil war era. I also wanted to reconstruct addiction as an epidemic, right? So, I wanted to tell this big picture story of what I came to recognize as America’s earliest or first opioid crisis. But I didn’t want the people to get lost in that broader framework.

And so, I wanted to tell that big story, the history of the epidemic, but I also wanted to narrate the individual stories of civil war veterans. What I settled on was a methodology where I situated the story in a one-hundred-year window dating from the 1820s through the 1920s, and I did a lot of research into how people thought about substances, how people prescribed and also dealt with, opiates. But I decided to tell a human-centered story. I focused really closely on a data set. That’s a really unhuman way to describe them, but a sample of 200 Civil War veterans that I found over the years of doing the research. And so, I tell this broader story through the eyes of these individuals as much as I can. So I guess to put it all back into words, it’s a big story, it’s the epidemiological history, but it’s also, I hope, a human story too, so that the individual people whose lives are so affected by addiction in the 1800s don’t fall by the wayside in telling the bigger story.

HM: Thank you so much. So, on the topic of research and turning research into a story, we were wondering if you could talk a little bit about how your time at the Richards Center contributed to or ended up shaping the project.

JSJ: Yeah, my time at the Richard center honestly meant everything to me. I never imagined a scenario where in my career I would have an opportunity to do something like the Richards Center postdoc that I did in 2020 and 2021—to just dedicate myself to doing additional research and to refining a project. And so that chunk of time at the Richards Center came at a really crucial moment for me. I was about to step into, luckily, an academic position, but a rather teaching intensive position, and I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time over the subsequent couple years to work on my writing, and so I dived into the postdoc at the Richards Center, knowing that at the end of it, I wanted to have an early version of the book manuscript. I needed to go from dissertation to book, or at least a draft of the book, in the course of a year.

And so, having the chance to step away from teaching, to step mostly away from service, except for scholarly organizations and things like that, and really immerse myself in the research that I had already started doing, but also the chance to workshop pieces of the manuscript at the Richards Center, to interact with the faculty and staff and students at the Richards Center, and also outside scholars that generously donated their time to read really closely the early version of my manuscript, couldn’t have come at a better time. I think without the year at the Richards Center, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the book as quickly as I did.

But more importantly, I don’t think it would have been at the same scale that I was able to write. I think it would have been a much smaller, more narrowly focused story. In particular, when I came to the Richards Center, I thought of myself as a scholar of Civil War veterans, and I was thinking mostly along the lines of like manhood and gender and questions like that. But at the Richards Center, I was challenged to think more in terms of other questions, like race, for example. And so being able to workshop the material that I had found and see it through a new set of eyes and be asked new questions about it, I think made the story much more rich, and really did change my research findings as well.

EC: I’m really curious, in that research process, if there is anything particularly surprising or interesting that you found, a specific source or a particular insight?

JSJ: Definitely. Yeah, wow. Where to begin? I guess the thing that most immediately comes to mind is when I was working on this project as a dissertation, I was not so much focused on specifically the question of Chinese immigrants and opium smoking. My frame of reference for this is going to get a little bit deep in the weeds here, apologies, but my frame of reference was Civil War veterans. They were mostly white, mostly born in the United States. Of course, about ten percent of the Union army is Black. But in my sources, I found that the topic of Black soldiers and opioid use was really under covered by the sources. In the earlier phase of my research, I was mostly focused on a particular set of white male Civil War veterans, and I had detached the story that I was thinking about and telling from the broader Gilded Age context after the Civil War, where you have these really heated debates over immigration and race, and, of course, the racial upheaval coming out of Reconstruction.

And so, I believe it might have been Cathleen Cahill, who first prodded me, and encouraged me to think about Chinese opium smoking on the West Coast in relation to Civil War veterans further east in the north and the south in the 1870s and the 1880s. I dived into a set of primary sources, these legislative debates in California about drug use and immigration, things that I would have never even thought to question and to try to relate back to the story that I told. And what I ended up finding is that the “problem,” right, the perceived problem of opioid use, those Civil War veterans and other native-born, particularly white Americans, were the overwhelming majority of opioid users. They did not surface as much in the kind of public debates about opioid use as Chinese opium smokers did, even though they had very different ways of consuming. I don’t want to get too far into the weeds, but there are almost two parallel ways of consuming the drug. But yet, Chinese immigrants got scapegoated, and that affected the way that people talked about Civil War veterans as well. None of that would be in the book without having been asked those questions during some of the workshops that I did at the Richards Center. And so those kinds of sources were super, super powerful.

HM: It’s fantastic to hear you talk about how the exciting things you found were maybe due to the time at the Richards Center, as well! That’s great. So, because the Richards Center is a center for the study of the Civil War era, we’d love to hear what your thoughts are on how your book changes the way we think about or consider the Civil War era broadly?

JSJ: Yeah, I appreciate this question. I’ve had to give this a lot of thought lately. One of the things that comes front of mind to me is that I think still, it’s the case, that a lot of times when we think about the Civil War, as traumatic as it was, as bloody as it was, I mean, America’s bloodiest conflict, more people died during the civil war than all of America’s other wars kind of combined. Even still, I think we tend to sanitize the conflict. I think that we tend to have a narrative around the conflict, with things like reenacting and movies, makes it seem, to a certain extent, like it was fun and games. And I also tend to think that when we, in an academic sense, focus on the Civil War, we’re a lot of the time inadvertently telling what scholars call a freedom narrative—a narrative that focuses on the abolition of slavery, and rightly so. But I think in these twin ways of thinking about the Civil War, a lot of the drama and the bloodshed can be sanitized.

And so, the first thing that I wanted to do with this book, besides uncover this history that had been largely forgotten and had never really been taken seriously, I wanted to bring back. I wanted to take a hard look at kind of the traumatic aftershocks of the Civil War in a way that I thought would bring a more realistic reconstruction of the conflict. Yes, we should, of course, talk about abolition. Yes, we should talk about all the other kind of changes, you know, politically, that come out of the Civil War, right? But also, at the same time, it’s really difficult to celebrate a war that was so catastrophic. I wanted to remind people of that broader point.

Certainly, I’m not the only scholar to make that point. Over the last ten or fifteen years, a number of scholars have written books that critics sort of laugh off as the dark side of the Civil War. But I think it’s really important to think about the cost of all the changes that are brought about by the Civil War in order to understand the conflict with a more wholesome accounting of the costs.

The other thing that I wanted to do was to take the medical history of the Civil War very seriously. A lot of the time when we think about books about the Civil War era, medicine maybe gets a few lines or maybe a chapter. But the most universal experience of the Civil War was getting sick and suffering, right? And so, I think for me, the Civil War is medical history. I wanted to tell a story about the Civil War and the aftershocks of the Civil War, but have medicine surfaced to the front of that. In doing so, what I point out, what the research shows, is that the Civil War really changed American medicine in ways that are pretty unexpected. Some of the earliest iterations of drug addiction therapy, for example, in the U.S., we can trace those right back to the late 1860s when Civil War veterans were returning home addicted to drugs like opium and morphine. And that’s just scratching the surface. So, to sum it up, I wanted to reconstruct a more realistic, more harrowing, version of the Civil War, and I wanted to do so through the lens of medical history. And so, I hope those are the kinds of contributions that the book will make.

HM: Thank you so much. We, again, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.

JSJ: Thank you for having me.