November 2010 Archives

Will Bryan, a doctoral candidate in the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, is the author of today's post. While attending the recent Southern Historical Association Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, he took the opportunity to explore how the city approaches public history. Will researches the roots of the modern southern environmental movement and thus was particularly interested in seeing how the city addressed its post-bellum history.

Charlotte, North Carolina is a New South city. Although I grew up just eighty miles south of the Queen City, I identified it more with the Panthers and Hornets (a bygone era) than railroads, cotton mills, and segregation. Yet my recent attendance at the Southern Historical Association's Annual Conference in Charlotte made me reconsider the city that I thought I knew so well. Many of the panels dedicated to the postbellum South examined the struggles over citizenship, social and political rights, economic development, and racial strictures that continue to shape the region today. This is certainly true of Charlotte itself, which was relatively undeveloped prior to the Civil War--having a population just over 1,000 in 1850.  The city's growth hinged on the expansion of railroad lines which facilitated the development of industries like textile manufacturing. The expansion of industry and trade within Charlotte fostered other industries, such as banking and finance. By 1908 the city had its first skyscraper, and had even been visited by President Theodore Roosevelt. Yet the city's history was not a story of unchallenged progress--especially for its African American population. Indeed, historians have determined that Charlotte actually become more segregated as the city developed, culminating in the United States Supreme Court's 1977 ruling in Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which gave the federal government greater control over enforcing desegregation of public schools and allowing authorities to use busing to achieve integration.

Unlike much of the region, Charlotte has been fairly forthright in acknowledging the importance of this postbellum history with the Levine Museum of the New South--located just downtown. The museum contains displays dealing with Charlotte's history, from the development of sharecropping and its embrace of cotton monoculture to the growth of the city's considerable banking industry. Visitors can experience a reconstructed sharecropper's shack, feel the machinery from a textile mill, re-enact a sit-in at a lunch counter with Civil Rights activists, and even walk through a simulated city street from the early twentieth century. The museum is therefore particularly good at showing many facets of life and labor in the postbellum history of Charlotte and should serve as a model for the rest of the region in how to approach this critical era.

Cotton Machinery - Levine Museum (Charlotte, NC)

Indeed, although there are numerous museums and displays devoted to the antebellum South and Civil War, the region's public history in large part makes it seem like the southern past ended at Appomattox. Yet, as is clear from Charlotte's history, Jim Crow laws, struggles for social and political rights by African Americans, and industrialization all profoundly shaped southern culture after 1865. Charlotte points to the future of southern public history, and other cities in the South--even those with a storied antebellum past--would benefit from further scrutiny by public historians. Charleston, South Carolina, for example, presents visitors with myriad presentations about the life of the city's plantation grandees, but where are explanations of the city's racial struggles following the Civil War, overviews of the lives of the city's laborers in industries like phosphate mining and commercial fishing, or even displays dealing with the city's 1886 earthquake and its disparate impact on white and black residents?

Drayton Hall Plantation (Charleston, SC)

All of these are critical to understanding Charleston today, but are rarely encountered by most visitors to the city. There are, however, indications that this is beginning to change throughout the region. For instance, Wilmington, North Carolina has finally constructed a monument acknowledging the massacre of African Americans in the city's 1898 race riot. Yet this change has been slow, and public historians should continue to follow Charlotte's lead--working to more fully highlight the region's postbellum history.

The recently concluded mid-term elections brought predictable complaints from some segments of the media and some politicians that we had reached a nadir of so-called "negative" political advertising or campaigning. This complaint seems to appear as regularly as the elections themselves and, if not simply disingenuous, it is at least a canard. It is difficult to assess negative advertising, because the term itself is rather amorphous. However, one can argue that attacks on one's opponents have been integral to political campaigning throughout the country's history. Of course, from the late 18th through the first half of the 19th century, politicians running for national office rarely campaigned on their own behalf, and political campaigns often were carried out through newspapers. Partisan newspapers were particularly adept at scurrilous attacks. When Thomas Jefferson ran for president in 1800, some Federalist newspapers had no compunction about reprinting contemporary accounts of his not-so-illicit sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. During his successful campaign for the presidency in 1828, Andrew Jackson was enraged by claims that his wife Rachel was a bigamist (having taken up with Jackson after being abandoned by, but not obtaining a legal divorce from, her previous husband). Gail Bederman has shown that when Teddy Roosevelt was a young state legislator in Albany, New York in the 1880s, he confronted newspaper accusations that he was too effeminate and possibly gay.

Indeed, "negative" advertising in political campaigns is nothing new. With that overlong introduction, I would like to thank Penn State doctoral candidate Rachel Moran for passing on the link below. It dresses up the bitter presidential contest between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1800 in a recognizable, contemporary format.

In September we brought you news of the preparations for the re-enactment of Harrisburg's Grand Review, the parade of African-American Union veterans that took place in Pennsylvania's capitol city in November, 1865. The re-enactment takes place this weekend, but this will not be the end of the festivities commemorating African-Americans' participation in the Union war effort. Our readers in central Pennsylvania will be interested to know that on Sunday, November 14 the town of Bellefonte will honor African-American Civil War veterans from Centre County. Bellefonte's Grand Review Recognition will take place at Union Cemetery on East Howard Street at 2:00 p.m. It will be preceded by a special worship service at the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church on St. Paul Street. Participants in the event will include various Civil War re-enactors, the Coburn Brass Band, and Penn State ROTC cadets, among others. The review will also consist of a flag presentation ceremony. Charles Dumas, Professor of Theater at Penn State, will be the master of ceremonies. The Bellefonte Grand Review is one of several state-wide events this year that honor the sacrifices of Pennsylvania's African-American citizens in the Civil War. African-American military service during the war was especially onerous. Not only did they suffer the humiliation of receiving lower wages than their white counterparts until late 1864, they also faced greater dangers in battle. Black soldiers captured by Confederate forces were subject to fierce abuse, summary execution, or enslavement. Despite these dangers, roughly 200,000 African-Americans served in the Union army and navy.

For more information about the Bellefonte Grand Review, click on the attachment below, or use the following contact information.

Gary Hoover: BellefonteCOC@aol.com, 814-355-2917

Candace Dannaker: Dannaker13@aol.com, 814-355-7577

http://centrecountyhistory.org/events/USCTAnnouncement.pdf

This Saturday will mark the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's election as president of the United States. As we approach this anniversary, we at the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center wanted to share an interesting piece of trivia about our 16th president. Center supporters Tom and Gee Gee Ferrier shared with us a copy of an article by Joseph Hamilton from the winter 1991-92 issue of Common Ground Magazine about Lewistown, Pennsylvania's monument to Civil War soldiers and sailors. Located in Lewistown's Monument Square, this memorial includes a stone from Lincoln's tomb in Springfield, Illinois. The monument was dedicated in June 1906, during a period when numerous towns, both North and South, began erecting memorials to their communities' sacrifices in the war. The stone from Lincoln's tomb became available after the tomb itself had been refurbished in 1901. Major R. B. Hoover, a Lewistown native, was a member of the Lincoln Memorial Foundation, and thus was able to use his position to secure the stone for his hometown monument.

 

For Lewistown's community leaders the memorial did not merely mark the town's sacrifices in the war. Rather, it claimed a unique role for the Logan Guards, the Mifflin County militia unit that was among the first military units to reach Washington and offer its services to the Union at the start of the Civil War. The community asserted its pride of place in being the home of these so-called First Defenders. The memorialization of these volunteers also had a more prosaic purpose. As Nancy Hill noted in an article in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, "the display of relic collections and memorabilia" in museums and other public attractions had become commonplace  by the early twentieth century. This was the "beginning of the age of tourism, when visitors enjoyed many kinds of local oddities as part of their travel experience." When we think of Civil War tourism, we tend to think of battlefield tours and the enduring popularity of large national parks, such as Gettysburg (the online magazine Slate recently featured a travelogue series it titled "Civil War Road Trip"). However, Hill reminds us that small communities competed for this burgeoning Civil War tourism as well, and they often promoted "local oddities" to lure tourists to their towns. Indeed, the Mifflin County Historical Society (located across the street from the monument) asserts that this is the only stone taken from Lincoln's tomb to be incorporated into another monument. This assertion of the uniqueness of the monument was not merely intended to emphasize the special role that the community's Logan Guards had played in the early stages of the war. It represented a novel way to attract Civil War tourism as well.