October 2010 Archives

Many thanks to Andrew Prymak for providing this post on the recently completed Brose Lectures. Andrew is a doctoral candidate in the Richards Civil War Era Center and is currently writing his dissertation, The Politics of Debt: Financial Citizenship, Nationalism and the State During the Civil War Era.

Last week, Professor James O. Horton delivered the latest edition of the Brose Lectures that importantly and engagingly stressed the continuing virulence of the Lost Cause and stressed the need for public historians to combat this school of thought. Given within days of the news that a fourth-grade textbook in Virginia had baselessly argued that black southerners had enlisted in the Confederate army, Professor Horton passionately contended to a largely public audience that such claims are rooted in a desire to divert attention away from slavery as the main cause of secession and war.

To prove his point, Horton enlisted many facts and images that are always captivating when revisited. Take, for instance, the purported photograph of the 1st Louisiana Native Guard. Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr. do a wonderful job describing the origins of this photograph in their online piece "Retouching History: The Modern Fascination of a Civil War Photograph". On a quick first glance, the photo includes 17 black infantrymen dressed in greatcoats with their arms and equipment. Labeled as an 1861 photograph of black Confederate soldiers, the image was once available for sale on the web at a neo-Confederate site.

Horton ably described the manipulations to produce this photograph. As Handler and Tuite convincingly show, when compared to a photograph of 18 black northern soldiers and their white officer in a Philadelphia studio, one quickly deduces how others manipulated this image into the photograph for sale. By cropping out both the northern officer and a black soldier on his immediate left while obscuring some details like belt buckles bearing the 'U.S' insignia, some person(s) deliberately manipulated this image in attempting to produce the illusion that black soldiers fought for the Confederacy.

This photo left a significant impression upon the audience, and provided an important entry into the motivations behind the doctoring of such images. As many white Americans did in the early twentieth-century with the image of the faithful slave, modern day neo-Confederate have latched onto the fallacy of black Confederates as a way to blunt the fact that the South seceded to protect the institution of slavery. Horton called on public historians to confront this trend and remind Americans how slavery was central to the Civil War.

He drove this point home by referring to the proceedings of the secession conventions in the various southern states as well as the writings of the southern secession commissioners that Charles Dew mined for his accessible and pointed Apostles of Disunion. Indeed, Horton pointedly encouraged the audience to use the words of the Confederate leaders themselves against any claims that black southerners fought for the Confederacy.

Bruce Levine further explored the problem of black Confederates in his wonderful and richly researched Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (Oxford). Noting the very limited emancipation plans that a decided minority of Confederate officials harbored later in the war, Levine stresses how these plans only emerged close to the Confederacy's defeat and deeply embedded within the institution and culture of slavery. He notes that these few Confederate officials were willing to grant "no more than the most limited, circumscribed form of freedom to the black soldiers they expected to recruit" and that, by doing so, they desired to maintain strict control of the population of black southerners to keep them "as a cheap and malleable plantation labor force" despite the crumbling of slavery through the efforts of both black southerners and the Union Army. Still, the grand majority of slave owners and non-slaveholding white southerners stridently opposed any form of extremely limited emancipation given the Confederacy's explicit link to slavery and, more importantly, black southerners possessed no desire to fight for the preservation of the institution of slavery and a slave society given the ever increasing likelihood of freedom and slavery's destruction (15). In essence, Levine forever drives a stake through the heart of this belief in the existence of black Confederates. James Horton, in his lectures, continues to both spread this message beyond the academy and combat the still formidable presence of the Lost Cause.

Many thanks to Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory for his recent post about Republican congressional candidate Rich Iott, and his much-talked-about portrayal of a Waffen-SS soldier at WWII reenactments.

Kevin makes the point that the controversy surrounding Iott's hobby reveals Americans' double standard when it comes to Civil War reenactors. We ask reenactors who portray Nazis to answer for their alter-egos' politics -- why not demand the same of CW reenactors? 

It's a good question. Why do most Americans consider Confederate reenactors merely quirky, while they would probably consider Nazi reenactors morally suspect? Why are the former allowed to skirt the subject of slavery and politics, while the latter are almost automatically assumed to share an ideological affinity with Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels? The answer, of course, is not to let the folks in SS uniforms off the hook, but rather to hold the men in gray (and blue) accountable for the story (if not the moral burden) of slavery and racism.

But what makes this story truly fascinating, and of particular relevance to historians, is the way in which a misreading of one war inflects how Americans read another. Note the Civil War/Lost Cause sensibility that permeates not only Iott's comments but those of his WWII reenactment unit. Change 'National Socialism' to 'secession,' and 'Denmark, Norway, and Finland,' to 'Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina,' and you have a statement that would be right at home in any Lost Cause rant. The same sort of apolitical idealism and aimless bravery that characterizes Southern soldiers in the Lost Cause rendition appears here in a 20th-century guise. German soldiers, they argue, didn't fight for the tenets of National Socialism -- no more than Confederate grunts fought for proslavery ideology! Rather, both fought for some vague and meaningless notion of a better world -- one so thoroughly divorced from politics that it might as well mean nothing. 

How did we arrive at this point? How did a few individuals come to read the Civil War into the Second World War?  Not long ago, academic historians were doing the exact opposite, reading the Second World War into the Civil War, depicting Johnny Reb and Billy Yank as apolitical GIs, motivated not by ideology but by primary group cohesion -- that is, by their responsibility to their fellow soldiers. More recently, and thanks to the efforts of James McPherson, Chandra Manning, and others, those of us in the academe have seen the error of our ways and have begun to regard Civil War soldiers as political actors in their own right -- as citizen soldiers who brought their politics with them to the army camp, and fought for explicitly political purposes (among them patriotism, nationalism, white supremacy, Union, and/or anti-slavery). 

Strange then, that at just the moment when Civil War soldiers are beginning to be depicted in their own unique light, WWII soldiers, once the lens through which other soldiers were understood, should take on the (false) motivations of the men in gray. Nevermind the myriad differences between the 19th century South and 20th century Germany -- a misguided few now claim that soldiers from both eras were motivated by a vague, apolitical, and empty-headed desire to fight for 'family' and 'freedom.'

Disturbing as it is, this development does not seem to be indicative of a particularly widespread trend; it does, however, speak to our unique responsibility, and the strange power of the American Civil War. For better or worse, interpetations (and interpreters) of the Civil War have the power to influence the public's thinking on much more than the war itself.

This past week, two prominent historians of the Civil War era, Eric Foner and Sean Wilentz, were guests on the Peabody-award winning radio interview program Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross. The program is produced at Philadelphia's WHYY and is broadcast over the NPR network. On October 11, Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, spoke about his recent book The Fiery Trial, which traces Abraham Lincoln's evolving attitudes toward African-Americans and slavery during his political career. In this interview, Foner emphasized Lincoln's gradual, yet dramatic, move away from supporting the colonization movement (which sought to emancipate slaves and send them to Africa or the Caribbean) as a young acolyte of Henry Clay. By the time Lincoln issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, he shunned any notion of colonization and implicitly acknowledged that African-Americans were integral members of the country and American society. Foner also addressed recent debates over amending or repealing the 14^th amendment, contrasting recent criticisms of national citizenship with the historical context in which a Republican Congress crafted the article.

On October 13, Sean Wilentz, like Foner, addressed recent political debates that are shaping this year's midterm congressional elections. Particularly, he discussed the radical roots of Glenn Beck's popular brand of political populism. Far from being a new trend in politics, Wilentz claimed that the distrust of intellectual elites (Glenn Beck's online university purports to give people an unmediated education in "real" American history) and the fear of socialist conspiracies, which inform Beck's political attitudes, actually have their roots in conservative Cold War movements. Wilentz specifically drew connections between the beliefs propagated by the John Birch Society and those espoused by Beck on his highly-rated Fox television and radio programs.

With the sesquicentennial of the Civil War fast approaching and contentious midterm election campaigns coming to a head, one can safely assume we will be seeing and hearing more from Civil War historians on the public airwaves.

We have another entry today from Kristen Campbell that sheds light on another aspect of her internship at Gettysburg National Military Park this past summer. Today, she gives us some insight into the exacting process of maintaining an accurate inventory of the park's archival materials and also allows us a peek at John Wilkes Booth's dressing gown.

Inventory!

Performing inventory is incredibly important. Since every object is a valuable part of American history, we must routinely check that every object is in fact there! Theft, mismanagement of a collection, and misplacement can all cause artifacts to go missing if they are not carefully accounted for. Gettysburg is constructing a new Visitor's Center, and the move from the old building to the new one makes it especially important to keep a running inventory of the collection. As anyone who has ever moved from one home to another knows, some things seem to disappear among the sea of boxes unless one keeps careful track of each item. When I first arrived at the park, this was my job: check to make sure every item is in its proper place. The park uses a special computer database to keep a detailed catalogue of every item in the collection. Using this database, I printed out an inventory of the contents of every cabinet, shelf, and box. I then searched through every cabinet, shelf, and box to make sure that everything was in fact in its proper place and that everything that appeared in the drawer also appeared in the database. That involved a lot of searching for items as large as cannon and as small as a single bullet. The job was tedious but also a bit fun, as it was neat for me to explore the collection. I found some interesting things: Abner Doubleday's diploma from West Point, John Wilkes Booth's dressing gown, even an intricately carved prosthetic arm. The process took weeks, but it was worth it. The park must submit a randomized inventory to the Department of the Interior every year to demonstrate that the collections are being properly cared for. When they sent us the randomized list we were quickly and accurately able to account for everything on it. 

 

Moving every little arrowhead, button, glass shard, and bullet into the proper box.

John Wilkes Booth's dressing gown in the textile racks.

The busy folks at C-SPAN have just uploaded video to their website of one of the panels at this past year's Society of Civil War Historians. The panel, "Reunion? Reconciliation? Appomattox Revisited: Competing Narratives of the Surrender that Ended the Civil War," took place at the society's meeting in Richmond, Virginia this past June. It featured provocative presentations by Joan Waugh, Elizabeth R. Varon, and Caroline E. Janney. Peter Wallenstein presided over the panel. As a proud graduate of Colby College, I am happy to point out that Colby's Elizabeth Leonard provided the response to the panelists' papers. Click the link above to view the video at C-SPAN's homepage and enjoy the lively presentations and the discussion that follows.

Many thanks to The Washington Post, for this excellent article on collector Tom Liljenquist's recent contribution of over 700 photographs to the Library of Congress. Mostly small ambrotypes and tintypes, the pictures feature everyday men and women from the Civil War-era. Although most of the pictures depict white soldiers (many taken before the subjects left for the front), the collection also contains rare photos of black Union soldiers and African-American women, family portraits and mourning shots.

Perhaps the most moving is a picture of a little girl dressed in a mourning dress, holding a photograph of her father, a cavalryman. While infused with nineteenth-century melodramatic pathos, the photo nevertheless communicates a sense of loss and sadness that goes well beyond Romantic cultural conventions (if you want see the photo, click the link to the slideshow in the Post's article).

Some of the photos display something of their subjects' sense of humor. Due as much to the technical limitations of nineteenth-century photography as to contemporary cultural onventions, early photos tend to feautre rather dour looking subjects. One photo in the collection, however, defies this tendency, featuring two soldiers holding each others' cigars. Wearing sour expressions, the two soldiers nevertheless communicate something of their youthfulness and playfulness (again, see the Post's slideshow for the image itself).

To view the complete digital collection, click here for a link to the Library of Congress website.

Researchers have recently realized that a property Bethesda, MD officials purchased for $1 million at the height of the housing bubble is not, in fact, the site of the 'real' Uncle Tom's Cabin. While Josiah Henson -- a Maryland slave who escaped to freedom in Canada, founded a runaway communitee, and penned a memoir that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel -- did live in the vicinity of the house (i.e. in the slave quarters on the surrounding plantation), he did not live in the house itself or in the attached cabin (see below). The 'cabin,' in fact, is not a cabin at all. Built in 1850, years after Henson had escaped slavery, the 'cabin' was initially used as a kitchen.

As we speak, Montgomery County is -- according to the Washington Post -- looking for ways to turn this boondoggle into a boon for the greater DC area and for students of history everywhere. Henson's cabin or not, I feel this might be an excellent opportunity to bring the history of plantation slavery to the Nation's Capital and its many vistors. While a former plantation (i.e. Arlington) is among the DC area's most visited sites, many visitors quite understandly overlook this aspect of the site's history. Looking out from the Tomb of the Unknown Solider, it's difficult to register a parallel sense of historical grief and remember that that people were held here as chattel slaves. Among those who do know its history, many are so intoxicated by the Lee Mystique that they fail to consider the nastier dimensions of slave life that took place on and around the scattered graves.

That said, a new site -- unburdened by another body of history and another set of connotations -- might be a great asset to the many wonderful historic sites in and around DC. With more funding, more research, and more support, Bethesda might make something great from their mistake. A recognition of the history of slavery located just outside the Beltway would be a huge step forward.

Dr. James O. Horton, the Benjamin Banneker Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History at The George Washington University and Historian Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, will deliver lectures on Slavery and Civil War Memory for the 2010 Steven and Janice Brose Distinguished Lecture Series. The lectures will take place on October 21, 22, and 23, in 110 Business Building on Penn State's University Park campus.  

Sponsored by the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, the Brose Lectures are free and open to the public, and feature three thematically linked lectures by leading writers, historians, and intellectuals whose work focuses on the American Civil War era. Established by a generous gift by Penn State alumni Steven and Janice Brose, the lecture series generates publication of the annual lectures by the University of North Carolina Press. Past lecturers have included  Carol Reardon, Nina Silber, Thomas C. Holt, Gary Gallagher, Mark Noll, Mark Neely, Michael Holt, Drew Faust, and Eric Foner.

The schedule for Dr. Horton's lectures is as follows:

"Race and Slavery: America's Great Contradiction" Thursday, Oct. 21, 7:00 pm

"The 1850s: America's Most Critical Decade" Friday, Oct. 22, 7:00 pm

"America's Memory of Slavery and the Civil War" Saturday, Oct. 23, 4:00 pm

Dr. Horton has published ten books, most recently Landmarks of African American History and Slavery and the Making of America, both published by Oxford University Press in 2005 and 2004, respectively. Slavery and the Making of America served as the companion book for the PBS series of the same name. Horton's lectures will build on these recent works by examining America's shifting and complex national memories of slavery and race.

For more information on the lectures, the speaker, or the Richards Center, contact the Center at 814-863-0151, or visit the web site.