The Roots of Modern America Blog

July 15, 2009

Sen. James Maury Mason, Black Labor, and the Aftermath of the Civil War

Filed under: Civil War, Reconstruction, social experience — Tags: , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 3:10 pm

On a recent research trip to the National Maritime Museum archives in Greenwich, U.K., I was working through the papers of William Schaw Lindsay, the M.P. who was the most vocal supporter of the Confederacy in Parliament. Lindsay traveled widely in the U.S. before the Civil War. Indeed, he was in America during the 1860 Presidential election and as a leading British businessman and representative he met many U.S. politicians. Lindsay corresponded with numerous Americans during the secession crisis. In 1861 he gave a speech at the North Shields Mechanic’s Institute on “America and the Americans” in which he argued that the separation of the North and South was permanent, that war was avoidable if Britain and others intervened, and that while slavery was abominable the North had no intention of eliminating or abolishing the institution. Taking Lincoln at his word, Lindsay thought slavery would not be touched in the states in which it existed. As for the future promise of America, it lay in the west. He traveled the Illinois Central Railroad in 1860 and observed first-hand “as far as the eye could see” the open lands on the prairie. This was a land of huge potential, he told his British listeners, and separation without war was preferable to a tragic national bloodbath. On his tour through America in the fall of 1860, Lindsay met Virginia’s leading U.S. senator–James Maury Mason. Then, during the war he hosted Mason who as the Confederacy’s lead diplomat sought British recognition for the Confederate States.

Header from James M. Mason December 21, 1869 letter to William Schaw Lindsay from "Clarens"

William Schaw Lindsay Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K.

 

The story of Mason’s failed diplomatic overtures is well known. His capture aboard the R.M.S. Trent prompted an international storm over the U.S. violation of Britain’s neutral rights. But Mason’s life after the collapse of the Confederacy was lived out of the public gaze.

I was surprised to see in the Lindsay papers a letter from Mason dated December 20, 1869 from “Clarens, near Alexandria.” Because I grew up at Clarens in the 1970s, the heading on the letter jumped out and caught my eye. I knew that Mason once owned Clarens. In fact, the legend of the place was that Mason never sat on the north-facing front porch because it looked out over the Potomac at Washington, D.C., the capital city Mason despised so much. Mason told Lindsay that while Clarens was a beautiful property, “the feature that mars all is that we are but eight miles distant from Washington, that nest of serpents + which is in full view but I have no communication with them.” So part of the Clarens legend had been confirmed–Mason had no love for the nation’s capital.

Mason’s home before the war broke out was in Winchester, Virginia, and, as he explained to his friend Lindsay, it was “destroyed, or rather obliterated, by the invaders.” After the war Mason stayed in Britain into 1866, a Confederate without a country, then went to Canada, where he and his family waited. Their waiting, according to his daughter Virginia Mason’s account, was an “exile” from their homeland–the South. But Mason, like Jubal Early and the other former Confederate leaders and officials waiting in Canada, waited because they were officially not extended amnesty until July 1868.

James Maury Mason, photograph, William Schaw Lindsay Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K.

James Maury Mason, photograph, William Schaw Lindsay Papers, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, U.K.

 

Deciding in 1869 to return to Virginia, Mason bought Clarens. The property adjoined that of his friend, the former Confederate General Samuel Cooper and was near the Episcopal Seminary, where other friends resided. “I gave for the whole establishment nine thousand dollars” in greenbacks, Mason told Lindsay in his letter about the purchase of Clarens. The greenbacks were his only remaining money, he confessed, and came from his wife’s family assets held in Pennsylvania through the war.

Mason described Clarens in this way: “an old residence, large + commodius home well built of brick + in good repair, ample lawns with venerable trees, and the garden (we call here the garden that which is appropriate to vegetables for the kitchen), good orchards of fruits pertaining to the South, including grapes with their trellises, The whole comprises nearly thirty acres of land. The side on the first high lands receding from the Potomac River distant two miles and of which on its summits commands a view of many miles. Our nearest town is Alexandria, one of the oldest towns on the Potomac, where there is good society and at the distance given above.”

Although he said nothing about whether he intended to rock on the front porch overlooking Washington or not, Mason did make a particular vow in his letter to Lindsay. “The poor negroes since they were manumitted are of course worthless, or rather worse than worthless,” Mason declared, “I have none of them in my service, and do not, however deeply I regret the necessity, intend to have.” Mason had brought “domestic servants (women) from Canada” and he intended to hire whites only. Negroes, he believed, were “the great curse of the country.” The fact that Reconstruction brought black voting particularly offended him; it was, he thought, the rule of the mob and the “end of the republic.”

With such convictions and with such vows, Mason lived another two years and died at Clarens in April 1871. Whether he rocked on the front porch or not, he likely did not employ any freedmen. Years later in 1906 Mason’s daughter Virginia compiled his letters into a published account of his life, and she passed on her father’s views to the next generation. She presented the plight of Southern whites as the main drama of the post war South–”their former homes reduced to ruins, and to be themselves reduced to the condition of quiet submission while ignorant and irresponsible negroes elected men to fill all the offices.” (The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason, p. 589)

James M. Mason’s strongly-held convictions about Clarens and the all-white labor force he employed there after the war set in motion a range of stories and ideas that suggested the limitations of Reconstruction and the profound resistance to change many Southern whites would exhibit in the coming years and decades. The war itself had been fought over the control of black labor–in the form of slavery. The post war South too would fight over the control of black labor. Newspapers were filled in the years after the war with urgent pleadings from the white South that it must have black labor or its entire economy would not move. It may not have occurred to James M. Mason that with their emancipation Alexandria’s blacks might share similar convictions and make similar vows as well–that they might never work for him even if he wanted them to.

January 20, 2009

Lincoln’s First Inaugural and American History

Filed under: Civil War, politics, social experience — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:19 pm

When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as President of the United States, he faced an unprecedented crisis. Seven states had already formally seceded from the Union, set up their own government in Montgomery, Alabama, and were actively recruiting more states to join them in forming a rival national government. Lincoln’s inauguration speech has often been admired for its moderation. The new President stated clearly that he would “hold, occupy, and possess” the federal government’s buildings and forts in the seceded states, but also that “there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” Lincoln tried to speak past the fanatics to “those who love the Union.”

We can admire Lincoln’s calm restraint, yet in retrospect Lincoln would seem to have misjudged the temper of the times and the resolve of the Southern whites. At the core of Lincoln’s first inaugural address was his assertion that “plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” Hundreds of thousands of white southerners disagreed, of course, and saw their nation as an independent republic, fully justified in peaceable separation from the Union. Lincoln asserted that “one section of the country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended.” Although he knew well that many Northerners found little wrong with slavery, Lincoln claimed that “physically speaking” the country could not be separated. And in his beautiful and poignant closing, calling on the “mystic chords of memory” and “the better angels of our nature,” Lincoln hoped Americans would set “passion” aside and renew their bonds of affection in the Union.

Lincoln had reason to believe in these feelings for the Union and that they might avert the looming conflict and violence; indeed, he probably had to have this faith on that day. His personal qualities and his political calculation led him to take a position of open invitation to the white South to return their hearts to the Union. He hoped time would cool off the angry response to his election, and with this expectation his inaugural address was genuinely offered as an attempt at reconciliation. Despite the elegance of his rhetoric, Lincoln’s idea that the American continent could not be physically separated into two or more republics was an assertion unsupportable by history or logic. Various empires had controlled large parts of the American continent and national identities in other parts of the world constantly changed the maps and atlases.Lincoln, however, challenged his “dissatisfied countrymen” to think twice about their actions. He vowed to uphold the constitution and his oath to defend the government, and he said that they in choosing secession bore the responsibility for a civil war. Most of all, Lincoln urged that both sides take time and move deliberately. With time, he hoped, these sad divisions might heal.

The difficulty Lincoln faced was in convincing white Southerners that these sentiments mattered. Few were listening. What happened to make such a distance of feeling, such alienation, possible? Lincoln likened the separation to a divorce, but all such analogies fail. Lincoln’s inaugural address, brave and elegiac as it was, was speaking into a hurricane. The white South in spirit and identity left the Union long before March 4, 1861. The divergence is difficult to time and locate in American history. Too often, our histories have followed Lincoln’s logic that separation was impossible, secession was a “sophism,” and the civil war was the product of discontented extremists–a set of arguments most forcefully made in his message to Congress on July 4, 1861. We might reconsider, however, the national purpose of the Confederate South and its origins. Historians, such as Drew Gilpin Faust, Anne S. Rubin, Peter and Nicholas Onuf, and Edward L. Ayers, have helped us see the white South’s national identity as deeper and more complex that Lincoln might have admitted. These historians and others suggest a white South whose Confederate national loyalties proved durable, even advanced and logical, drawing on the same sources of American nationalism in the Revolution and early national history. They knew what they were doing. We need to retain Lincoln’s sense of historical contingency, for he (almost alone) in his inaugural held out the possibility that things might be different, that persuasion and good will might be reciprocated, and that a reservoir of Unionism might save the nation from war and bloodshed. But we also might consider how sectionalism reinforced its own logic by slowly recasting forms of national identity, and in the process how two modern nations of Americans emerged ready to fight one another on modern scale of conflict. Then we might understand how Lincoln’s eloquent first inaugural fell on deaf ears.

July 18, 2008

The Rise and Fall of Segregation

Filed under: U. S. South, Uncategorized, politics, social experience — Tags: , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 10:42 am

In the final months of the Democratic primary, presidential candidate Barack Obama faced an unexpected dilemma. His minister at Trinity Church in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, became the subject of intense criticism and attention, so much so that Obama felt compelled to distance himself from his remarks. Wright had preached incendiary sermons, holding America accountable for generations of racial injustice, sermons that condemned, sermons like none that many white churchgoing Americans had heard before. They were downloaded off the Internet, and the most controversial clips were played again and again on television and the radio. Wright’s sermons sparked frenzied commentary, as many Democrats were left flat footed and many Republicans pounced on the Obama candidacy as insufficiently patriotic and deeply out of touch with American values.

Historian and author Garry Wills has likened Obama’s speech in answer to these charges to the one that Abraham Lincoln made as a Republican candidate for president at the Cooper Union in which he distanced himself from John Brown and presented his moderate positions against slavery’s extension clearly, firmly, and forthrightly.  In The New York Review of Books, Wills points out that Obama emphasized both the painful realities of our racial past and the positive progress the nation has made. Obama, more than any other presidential candidate in history, presents the future as open to change, able to be shaped, and this optimism resonates among many younger voters who believe that an era of racial division and discord has passed. 

If slavery dominated the first 250 years of the nation’s racial history, then the rise and fall of segregation certainly characterized the next 150 years.  From about 1880 to 1965 legal segregation in one form or anther prevailed in large parts of the United States, and the legacies of that system continued to have far reaching effects in American society into the 1990s. In the long context of racial division, Rev. Wright’s remarks, however challenging, cannot be surprising. We ought to ask, now more than ever, what sustained racial segregation for so long and what caused it to fall when it did.

C. Vann Woodward, the eminent Southern historian, pointed out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) that segregation emerged in Northern cities before the Civil War and that for a long period after the war in the South formal, legal segregation did not take root. The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and of Harriet Jacobs described their encounters with segregated rail cars in the North. And there is considerable evidence that southern racial boundaries were shifting, unclear, and in flux in the 1870s and 1880s. No one knew then, Woodward indicated in his still landmark analysis, that segregation would become so pervasive and resistant to change. Woodward held out the hope that the South had not always been so racially divided. He provided a history for how we became who we are in a way that allowed Americans, especially Southerners, black and white, to recover an experience of racial integration. 

The rise of segregation in the South came as it did in the North with the development of the most advanced technologies of the day–the railroad. Once segregation began, it was difficult to stop. Segregated cars, then depots, water fountains, bathrooms, beaches, pools, lunch counters, and voting booths. Like a cancer it metastasized, moving silently into unexpected places. By the 1950s segregation had become deeply entrenched in the South, a pattern of thinking and behavior, a wall of racial categories and divisions, a series of daily practices enacted with such consistency that few could comprehend how to challenge them. Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi gives us one of the most moving accounts of how disabling and and pervasive racial separation became in the rural South.

Historians have begun to reconsider the fall of segregation. First, historians have pointed out that resistance to segregation began much earlier than we commonly think, long before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In the thirties, indeed in the teens and twenties, black Americans protested and opposed political disenfranchisement and segregation laws. So, the movement to oppose segregation did not spring out of white Americans’ recognition after World War II of racial injustice, nor did it arrive in 1954 in the form of a Supreme Court decision as if out of the clouds. Black Americans actively and consistently opposed segregation much earlier, and the growing movement in the 1950s and 60s extended from and connected to these earlier efforts.

Second, scholars are beginning to look again at what made the broad social movement to end segregation possible, what made it take off, when so many social reform movements in American history have failed. The pillars holding up segregation were significant, based in political power, legal precedent, and social custom. The Supreme Court in its Brown decision in 1954 and again in 1955 rendered segregation in schools unconstitutional. And states in the South responded with what Virginia’s U.S. Senator Harry F. Bryd called “massive resistance.” Virginia in fact passed a series of “massive resistance laws” in a special legislative session in August 1956 designed to prevent desegregation by closing affected schools if necessary. In 1957 in Virginia J. Lindsay Almond won the governorship in a bitter campaign against Ted Dalton that hinged on the politics of who would defend segregation better. Then in 1958, Virginia plunged into “massive resistance” full force. The state closed schools in four places rather than allow them to integrate under federal court order, and in that same year, in rural Caroline County, sheriffs served a grand jury indictment against Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter for violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.

But often in these years, when whites were asked questions and prompted to defend segregation, they could not precisely say why segregation should prevail. They fell back on tradition, conservative values, and twisted constitutional logic and legalisms. A good example of this befuddlement occurred whenWDBJ intervew with Norview High School Studentsstudents at Norview High School were asked directly about desegregation in February 1959. When asked why he did not want black students at Norview, this student could only say “I don’t know why, I just don’t.” Yet, other students could easily see a time, probably in their lifetime, when interracial marriage would be accepted.

The forces holding up segregation were many and well-defended, and we should not underestimate them. Dozens were killed for challenging segregation and hundreds brutally beaten. Blind allegiance to a past way of doing things was powerful and provided the strongest elements of resistance to change. Despite the bluster of Virginia’s “massive resistance” and the stuffy and esoteric doctrine of “interposition” cobbled together by Richmond News Leader editor, James J. Kilpatrick, many whites, like the young man from Norview High, defended segregation for reasons that they could not fully articulate.

One of the most interesting recent perspectives on the struggle for civil rights in the South is David L. Chappell’s, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) which stresses black prophetic religion as the decisive force in what was, in effect, a cultural battle. He points out that black southern leaders were driven by a deep sense of realism, indeed a form of conservativism. They had little faith that economic progress would bring social justice. After all, segregation spread across the South at the very time of the region’s modern development and it came hand-in-hand with that era’s most modern devices.

There was no reason to believe, in other words, that time would solve the problem of racial injustice. Most of all, Chappell argues, black southerners seemed to have little of what white liberals so valued–optimism. Instead, a profound pessimism rested at the core of black prophetic views. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hope, Chappell explains, was carved from a mountain of despair. The black ministers and leaders were, it turns out, not idealistic at all. They read Neibhur. They drew on a deep reservoir of the Hebrew Prophets–they could not count on the world to improve itself, nor could they simply stand by while injustice persisted.

The white liberals, from Chappell’s viewpoint, were especially ineffective, if sincere and well meaning. Liberals at the moment of their greatest cultural authority, the 1930s, seemed to have failed to achieve anything substantial for black rights. They read Gunnar Myrdal, not the Hebrew Prophets, and believed that reason somehow would eventually wear down prejudice. But it did not and it probably would not.

Black southerners had no such illusions about their odds, nor about what they were up against. And Chappell asks an interesting and surprising question: why were the forces of resistance to change so culturally weak? Neither liberals (think of Kennedy) who wanted to slow down change and contain and control it (let time run its course of progress without intervention), nor segregationists who wanted to resist greater black freedom, were able to use religion to inspire self-dedication and solidarity to their cause. Chappell considers white religion the weak link in the segregationist armor. The failure of segregationists–for all of their political and legalistic authority–to get their churches to give them active support stripped the massive resistance campaign of cultural force, of conviction, of deep social power. Search as they might, white Bible readers could find little of the sanction for segregation that their grandfathers found for slavery.

The rise of segregation was not a by-product or inevitable extension of slavery. C. Vann Woodward told us that. Instead, segregation took shape around the modern spaces and technologies in the 1880s, gained strength from the progressive reform movement as a means to “clean” up politics, and gathered cultural weight with the rise of scientific racism or eugenics. Segregation, more than anything else, became a means of economic control and oppression.

The fall of segregation was equally complex and contingent. The new medium of televised news affected the way Americans saw racial injustice. The federal government’s battle with Cold War adversaries prompted wholesale changes, such as the desegregation of the military. And the black prophetic ministers preached sermons of great power, determination, and conviction.

Black prophetic criticism of American racial segregation sparked intense reaction in the 1950s and 60s. White politicians and government leaders cast suspicion on them as un-American and Communist-influenced. They were criticized for their pessimism, for protesting during the Cold War conflict, for calling attention to America’s blemishes and flaws. The prophetic voice of protest, whether black or white, has often been marginalized in the United States, where progress and optimism have held sway in the public square. Without that voice, however, Americans may never have heard the call, much less maintained the conviction, to end segregation.

The South has changed, and so has the nation. Jim Crow segregation has been brought down, though racism obviously persists. In the March 3, 2007 special issue of The Economist which focused on the American South, there is ample evidence of a progressive South, of a true “new South,” a South to which African Americans are moving at rate that exceeds those leaving, a South where there are more black elected officials than any other region in the nation, a South where polls show widespread acceptance of interracial dating.

Some aspects of the South, however, have not changed. There is still a place for the voices of change. Most significantly from The Economist special report came the disturbing news that the South’s schools still lag far behind the rest of the nation’s in nearly every category of measurement. It is safe to say that the region’s persistent undercapitalization of education over such a long time–one of the deepest legacies of segregation that has extended through the 20th century into the 21st–has crippled the South much more severely than all destruction by Sherman’s army in the Civil War.

June 24, 2008

How Slavery Ended in the Civil War

Filed under: Civil War, Uncategorized, slavery, social experience — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 6:15 pm

In the Library of Congress’ Cornelius Chase papers there are boxes of carefully collected records of the activities of slave traders out of Richmond, Virginia. Chase was a Quaker and an abolitionist, and he pulled together evidence and materials wherever he could find them of the inhumanity of slavery. There are two remarkable aspects to this collection. The first is just how quickly the slave trade modernized around telegraphs and railroads (a subject for another post).

The second is that slave traders were busy in the South right up through the end of the Civil War. Who would purchase slaves in, say, late 1864, and for what purpose? Surely, with slavery collapsing all around them, white southerners must have thought twice about holding slaves, much less buying slaves. Were they concerned about the war, about the price of slaves? What explains the actions of whites, any one of whom might have been the last person to purchase a slave in the Confederacy?

Historians from Armistead Robinson to Ira Berlin and Barbara Fields have argued that slavery broke down in the war and in many areas black self-liberation meant that slavery was collapsing from within. The focus of this argument has rightly been on the slaves themselves. So many thousands appeared at Fortress Monroe that Union General Benjamin Butler took them in as “contraband” of war in 1861, beginning a process of self-emancipation and enlistment in the Union cause that led to the formation of the U.S. Colored Troops units with over 180,000 black men in uniform by the end of the war. Despite the widespread movement of African Americans in the areas around the Union Army to free themselves, many slaves remained on plantations well out of reach of any Union forces. In Stephen Ash’s brilliant 1865: A Year in the South the Agnew plantation operated largely intact with over fifty slaves on it until early 1865. Union soldiers had yet to appear in the county. This experience was common and explains in part why Union General William Tecumseh Sherman wanted to reach the “interior” (as he called it) of the South with his March to the Sea. Similarly, even in Rockbridge County, Virginia, as late as July 1864, Confederate civilians had never seen a Union soldier. There were vast reaches of the interior South where the war was a distant, if very important, event.

And so the slave trade went on.  Browning & Moore, E. H. Stokes, Betts and Gregory, Dickenson and Hill, and other slave trading partnerships carried on their business in the war. The war clearly had an effect on slaves even before the Emancipation Proclamation. In January 1862 one man wrote a Richmond, Virginia, slave trader that he wanted to sell “a very intelligent negro” about 32 years old who had been “a very useful servant.” He put the slave on the market because “I think he has ideas very prevelant [sic] in this part of the country since the war began which render it a disagreeable task to [unclear] him.”

In the same year E. H. Stokes, a busy slave trader in Richmond, defended himself to the Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon, claiming he had hired a substitute and was exempt from the draft. Besides, he claimed, he ran a 2,000 acre plantation in Lunenburg County that produced surpluses for the Army and, as important, kept slaves under control in the wartime environment: “I have no overseer nor other white persons than myself to manage them [60 slaves]. With my supervision they can be made to support themselves, and raise a considerable surplus for the Army. Left to themselves, they would make nothing of consequence for themselves, nor for any body else. On the contrary they would speedily destroy all my supplies on hand.”

Even if slaves clearly understood what the war meant and that they might have the opportunity to take matters into their own hands, Confederate whites like Stokes saw little prospect for an end to slavery anytime soon. The records of these traders indicate a high volume of buyers and sellers even into 1863 after the Emancipation Proclamation. Southern whites, it seems, assumed there would be some sort of compensation for any eventual plan of emancipation to work, whether war imposed or not. Such views could not have been unreasonable after years of discussion of colonization and debates over many decades about gradual emancipation. The idea of an end to slavery seemed to Southern whites an unthinkable one, except perhaps on terms they might control and determine.

Their own government, the Confederate States of America, built itself around the idea of slaves as property and it was no accident that the U.S. Congress used its Confiscation Acts to provide the opening for emancipation. In July 1864 a frantic telegram, typical of many such wartime queries, came over the wires from Augusta, Georgia, to Richmond, Virginia. The Confederate Quartermaster wanted a ruling from his superiors: if he hired “negro teamsters for the Army of Tennessee would the government be responsible to the owners if they are captured or killed.” The Inspector General rendered a brief reply: “The Govt. will be responsible.” 

Slavery ended in and with the Civil War both because slaves sought their own freedom and because the Union Army demonstrated that the Confederate government could not make good on its promise to protect the property rights whites held in slavery. The formal abolition of slavery laws was carried out in the terms of reconstruction for Southern states. But slavery as an idea vested in property rights persisted among many whites and proved durable, a burning ember stamped upon but still glowing during the long Reconstruction years. The Confederate government was ultimately responsible for those rights and lost them in the war, but the expectations of many Southern whites in the war was that these rights were in a sense inalienable–that they might be taken by force but conceptually they were not lost. That slave traders continued their business unabated, that Confederates demanded compensation from their government for the loss of slaves impressed in the war, and that many of these activities persisted through 1864 and into 1865, indicate that many southern whites could not fully contemplate the end of slavey in the war.

June 3, 2008

On Terrorism, Guerrillas, and the American Civil War

Filed under: Civil War, social experience, technology, women — Tags: , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 6:03 pm

When United Flight 93 crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, the battle for control of the plane’s cockpit became almost immediately an iconic scene for Americans. The bravery of the passengers prompted widespread sympathy, awe, and appreciation. The story of their close confrontation with the terrorists, their grasp of the wider situation developing on that day, and their patriotic rush to overpower the hijackers defined what appeared to be a new form of warfare, one in which citizens might play major roles in meeting the enemy, one where civilians stood on the front lines.

The roots of this type of warfare and the widely felt terror that accompanied it can be found in the American Civil War when southern guerrillas and partisans struck fear in the Northern public. Significantly, the setting for this citizens’ form of warfare was, and continues to be, an important aspect of the encounter with terror. After 9/11, of course, the setting for this violence seemed to be the confined quarters of an airplane. In the Civil War the setting was the cramped cars of the railroad. Both settings have inspired fear in large part because the machine had the potential to become the instrument of war, a hurtling bomb, incredibly dangerous and shockingly terrifying to its passengers. These spaces made people feel anonymous and the violence appear random, as well as starkly opposed to the order and efficiency of the machinery.

During the Civil War something about the tight space of the railroad car and the possibility of attacks instilled fear among the Northern public. When southern guerrillas attacked railroad cars, stripped the passengers of valuables, set fire to the trains, or shot captured men, Northern civilians all along the border appeared at risk in a new way. Soldiers too might be caught in these circumstances.

Ephraim C. Dawes, a 1st Lt., went into the South with the 53rd Ohio Infantry, fought at Shiloh in 1862, and guarded the Memphis and Chattanooga Railroad in 1863. His unit tracked southern guerrillas in Tennessee and Mississippi during these years. The destruction his army produced was something he tried to convey to his family members back in Ohio: “you don’t know what war is. You can’t appreciate it. Wait till an army overruns the country. till all the male population are in arms till your fences are all burned orchards and barns and chicken roosts robbed, Houses entered and valuables stolen–gardens wantonly destroyed and all manner of excesses committed–not so much by the army as by loose craracters [sic] taking advantage of the unsettled condition of affairs to enrich themselves at everybody else’ expense. It may be the worse picture but it is very like things in the West. Tenn. District.”

Dawes’ family in Ohio, however, seemed unconcerned about the escalating chaos afflicting southern civilians and instead worried much more about the mounting threat of guerrilla raids into Ohio and on unsuspecting Northern soldiers and civilians. Dawes tried to calm their fears: “you need not go crazy or trouble yourself at all if I should be captured by guerrillas as they were never known to hurt anybody. All they do is to capture a man, steal all he’s got about him, make him ride a mule bareback 40 or 50 miles parole him and let him make his way afoot to the nearest civilization.”

But the Northern fear of guerrillas could not be so easily set aside. We might consider the role of the new technology of the railroad and the telegraph in structuring those fears. When Confederate partisan rangers brought telegraphic signaling boxes on raids and took control of Northern-run trains and stations, the sophisticated machinery appeared vulnerable in a surprisingly new way.

Moreover, the modern, refined, and enclosed space of the railroad car was also especially important in shaping these fears. The campaign to counter the insurgency of the southern partisans and guerrillas took the Union army years to organize and understand, and it played out differently in Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and Virginia. By October 1864, however, the guerrilla warfare and the counterinsurgency efforts of the Union Army had taken an unexpected turn. Union forces were using local Confederate civilians as human shields on the trains in Northern Virginia to prevent John S. Mosby’s men from attacking them. In Richmond the Confederacy’s leading newspaper editors were confident that Mosby would attack the trains anyway, even if he “knew that all who were dear to him were on a train.” They believed Mosby would not hesitate for a second “provided he were assured that the good of his country demanded the sacrifice.”

Such self-sacrifice and, indeed, the sacrifice of family, friends, and fellow citizens was tolerable, it seemed, in the service of the national cause. Northern newspapers routinely disparaged the Confederate guerrillas and partisans as lawless banditti, but Confederate newspapers just as vigorously defended them as legitimate forces in a modern struggle. Of course, the terms encompass a wide range of characters–from the elite and educated but ruthless Mosby to the vindictive and bloodthirsty William Quantrill whose raid on Lawrence, Kansas, indicated to many Northerners the madness and terror of guerrilla warfare.

Their actions, and especially the quite modern setting of their violence (and the fear it sparked), give us a different picture of the Civil War. The war encompassed types of violence well beyond the large-scale set piece battles we are familiar with, such as Gettysburg, and included forms of terror, hostage taking, random violence, and recrimination we have largely forgotten.

May 20, 2008

Railroads, Time Zones, and Interfaces

Filed under: Uncategorized, social experience, technology — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:21 pm

Our present time zones (Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern Standard) descend from railroads and the need to coordinate traffic across vast systems that developed in the United States after the Civil War. The official date for the U.S. adoption of standard time zones was November 18, 1883. But the railroads changed the ways we thought about time before that.Time was difficult to measure and assess with its variation across so many new networks that railroads established. An early device for measuring time, a sort of time map, was developed to aid such calculations. Here is an early example from A. J. Johnson, Johnson’s New illustrated (steel plate) family atlas : with physical geography and with descriptions geographical, statistical, and historical… (New York: Johnson and Ward, 1864): 

thumb.time
 

With Washington, D.C., in the center of the time atlas, a series of concentric rings of time extend outward through the world. If the time in Washington was 12:00 noon, then the time in Dover, Delaware, was 12:06 p.m., London, England, 5:08 p.m., Vera Cruz, Mexico, 10:43 a.m. All sorts of U.S. places appeared on this time atlas side by side with Paris, London, Berlin, Calcutta, Constantinople, Rome, and the Cape of Good Hope: including Little Rock, Nashville, Galveston, Omaha, and Iowa City, among others. This diagram of time was also a statement on geography–these places were important. Of course, one could not travel on an American railroad from Dover, Del., to St. Petersburg, Russia. But the imagined space could be traversed and the network, however imperfect, was rapidly being assembled. If one could travel from Dover, Del., to Santa Fe or San Francisco, then the rapid expansion of the rail network had wider implications that Americans could easily conjure up in their projections of what lay ahead in the future. Railroads put out elaborate time tables in the 1850s to organize their schedules for passengers. At first for many lines under one hundred miles, the time tables were simple affairs–a list of a dozen depots and their stop times. On railroads running north and south, such as the Philadelphia, Wilmington, & Baltimore, there was little variation in time. But as railroads broke through the Allegheny Mountain barrier to the west, such as the Baltimore and Ohio, time tables became considerably more complex.

The 1850s marked a major shift. Americans had to read these tables and convert them as well into prices and financial costs. Here’s the rate table for the Baltimore and Ohio in 1858:

borr.sm
  

[National Archives, Record Group 92, U.S. Military Railroad Records]

Time tables were equally complex. With over two hundred miles of rail to the Pittsburgh, the B and O represented one of the first major arteries to the Ohio River and the west. The Pacific railroad, though not begun until 1864, was discussed in the 1850s as the logical next step. All sorts of implications flowed from the idea of proximity and time. “If it had been built ten years ago,” one supporter of the transcontinental railroad wrote to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, “we should not have had a Southern Rebellion. If finished a year since, the whole road would have already been [used] in transporting troops and supplies.”  

Proponents of the transcontinental spoke also of the closing of distance and time as compelling in its own right. “In fifty hours this Capitol can be reached from the most remote parts of the country, east of the Rocky Mountains,” one Congressman explained in 1854. If the nation would construct the Pacific Railroad, the trip to San Francisco would take just six days and, he pointed out, the “entire circuit of the earth” could be traversed in 93 days. Indiana built 1,400 miles of railroad by 1856 and another 1,000 miles were projected before the close of the decade. Indiana’s Congressman cited the ingenuity of the people as the first reason for Indiana’s transformation from “an unbroken wilderness, inhabited only by the red man of the forest.” But closely and inextricably woven into his explanation was the railroad. The railroad made possible ingenuity’s promise. He was sure that “settlement and cultivation” would follow the railroad, and “civilization, enterprise, and wealth” would be the natural result. Such confidence came hand-in-glove with railroad expansion in these years and the widening sense that time could be mastered and controlled.

Long before time zones ordered and regularized the American landscape into discrete sections, the railroads actually created interfaces to their growing networks: elaborate time tables, rate tables, and time atlases for the public to visualize their place on the network and their relationship to others. These abstractions were an important break in how Americans thought of time and geography and of themselves.    

May 12, 2008

On Violence and the American Civil War, Part I

Filed under: Civil War, literature, social experience — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 1:03 pm

What do we know or think we know about the violence in the American Civil War? We certainly recognize the truth of Walt Whitman’s now well-known quip that the “real war” will never get in the history books. Our present struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan increasingly remind us that the reality of war remains a distant prospect for observers, even with “embedded” reporters and instant video satellite feeds from the battlefield.

Americans have tended to see the wars Iraq and Afghanistan as somehow especially violent and arbitrary–IEDs that seem to randomly maim and kill, mortar rounds carelessly lobbed into cities, and ambushes unleashed on supply convoys. Every war, it seems, spawns its own brand of special violence: mustard gas and machine guns in World War I, blitzkrieg tank attacks in World War II, land mines and jungle warfare in Vietnam.

Yet, the American Civil War has rested in American consciousness as somehow an exception, because it has largely escaped both the horror and diminishing that come with a special focus on the character and structure of its violence. Perhaps, it is the seeming grand purpose of the large “set-piece” battles that Americans want to preserve and hold on to, so that the violence, while acknowledged, remains at arm’s length, distant, removed, and on the margin of an otherwise clearly noble, purposeful, and comprehensible struggle. Our view of Civil War violence is quite contained–limited to the large battle and especially its major “charge.”

Violence in the Civil War, however, was shocking, diverse, public, and terrifying. We might consider two images from the war to help us see some of this. One concerns Ephraim C. Dawes, an ardent young Republican and Union army volunteer from Ohio. Dawes fought at Shiloh and other major western battles with distinction. He saw many fights in three years and wrote home that the roar of battle was something he could not adequately describe. Later at the Battle of Dallas in May 1864 in Georgia, Dawes suffered a serious wound. He had his entire lower jaw shot off. Dawes’ wound was painful and ugly. He could not talk, he could not eat, and he was by his own admission grossly disfigured. As he rode the train from Georgia north toward Union hospitals, people stared. Dawes explained to his family: “This trip was the most trying experience of all. Twenty six hours on a hard board seat over the rear trucks of a second class car. My wound was sloughing freely, very painful and offensive. I was nervous and weak. People looking at me annoyed me almost beyond endurance.” At the Union hospital in Nashville, he was given “bichlorinated soda” which when applied to his wound was like “liquid fire.”

A second image concerns the Atlanta Campaign. Much has been written about the destruction that Sherman’s army wreaked on Georgia and South Carolina. One of Sherman’s soldiers, George F. Cram, went back into Atlanta in late October to review the devastation. He found nearly every house “riddled and torn by our shells, here a tall chimney knocked down and there a portico carried away.” He could see how desperate the landscape of war was, for “along each side of the railroad were holes in the bank where families had crawled in to escape our iron showers.” Fine shade trees were “hacked to pieces.” Cram had little sympathy for those caught up in the destruction, but his detail deserves attention. Families burrowed into the railroad embankment in a desperate attempt to escape the violence that surrounded their world.

Violence, Randall Collins tell us in Violence (Princeton University Press, 2008), is difficult for people to perform, even soldiers, no matter how much drill they receive, no matter how much they believe in the cause for which they are fighting. The type, level, and outcome of violence of the Civil War was contingent on the situation, and we should pay attention to what Collins calls the “micro-processes” that structure these violent encounters. When we look more closely at a Civil War battle and its aftermath, and the violence within these events, we see a range of images more modern than we might expect. Refugees fled before armies, people hugged the earth as artillery screamed overhead and slammed into buildings, and wounded soldiers horrified strangers. Indeed, the literature of Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane have placed these realities before us more fully than many histories.

Perhaps the key dimension to the modernity of the Civil War was not its systematizing of soldiers, nor its organization of command structures, nor even, perhaps especially, its degree of ideological commitments. Rather, the modern aspects of the war can be seen in the types of situational violence it prompted: snipers, guerrillas, panicked civilians, wounded veterans, and commanders trying to create a decisive engagement by routing the enemy through massive violence.

April 25, 2008

Death and Dying in 19th c. America

Filed under: Podcasts, Uncategorized, social experience, women — Tags: , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 11:47 am

This podcast with Will Thomas and Leslie Working considers the experience of death and dying for 19th century Americans and the significance of changing ideas about death in American society. Sarah Sim and her husband Francis Sim migrated to Otoe County, Nebraska Territory, in 1856 to start a farm. Their trials included the death of three of their children, the near suicide of Sarah, the difficulties of moving to and farming in the Great Plains in the 1850s, and the death of Sarah from breast cancer in 1880. Their letters are online at Railroads and the Making of Modern America.

April 10, 2008

Moby Dick and the Problem of Slavery

Filed under: Civil War, Uncategorized, art, literature, social experience, technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:47 pm

Deep in the midsection of Moby Dick (1851), in chapter 55 to be precise, on “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” Herman Melville takes his readers on a little tour of the various blunders that scientists, painters, and sign makers have made in attempting to represent the whale accurately. They have all erred, Melville suggests, because the “living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait.” In fact, to see a whale out of the water accurately enough to represent it would be impossible. “Mortal man” can’t lift the whale out of the water “so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.” The only way for men to hoist the whale out and to get a look at him is to kill him first, and, of course, then all of the whales “undulations” are lost.

In a startling summation, Melville tells you that “there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.”

So, what does this whale symbolize? Is it the modernity of capitalism and industry, which we can only glimpse in parts? Is Captain Ahab’s ship the United States heading toward sectional break up in the pursuit of wealth, power, and violence? Is Ahab John C. Calhoun, bent on taking the U.S. down in a twisted quest of revenge, pride, or self-loathing?

Early on in Moby Dick, we learn that the whale and the whaling industry has extended its network across the seas to distant lands. It has created wealth and power and shaped lives far beyond those who set out at sea to harpoon the creatures. “Nowhere in all America,” Melville’s narrator tells us, “will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? How planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country? Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”

The wealth of America, then, was extracted, pulled out of the ocean, or the soil, or the forest, or the mine. Melville was up to something new here with his vision of the ships of the whaling fleet and the homes of New Bedford as part of a vast, complex, dark system, a network extending to the far corners of the earth.

While Melville was writing Moby Dick, a New England merchant born in Massachusetts, named Asa Whitney, was lobbying Congress to pass legislation to promote the building of a transcontinental railroad. In his detailed treatise on the subject, A Project for the Pacific published in 1849, Whitney emphasized the global networks of trade that seemed to him to be governed by Nature. To explain the “geographical division formed by nature” that kept the Pacific’s economy distant from the Atlantic’s, Whitney turned to whaling as his chief example.

Like Melville, Whitney sensed that whole economies were shifting in the wake of capitalism, but unlike Melville, Whitney had unbounded optimism in the modern changes all around him and in technological progress specifically. In fact, Whitney’s faith in the railroad and telegraph technology was so deep that he thought the transcontinental railroad would work exclusively to the United States’ advantage. Technology would fundamentally alter the dominant geographies that Nature determined–the flow of rivers, the aridity of certain zones, the mountainous barriers between regions.

Whitney saw Nature’s limitations all around him. With the opening of California as a base of operations, whaling as an industry, “that important branch of commerce,” would inevitably pick up and move to the Pacific coast. Whitney predicted the whaling fleet would shift wholesale from New Bedford to the Pacific for ease of access to the whales, and the East Coast would lose a powerful industry to the natural arrangement of geography and commerce. By 1849, he argued, the transition was already underway. Only through a planned and massive intervention–a transcontinental railroad–could Nature’s hold be broken and the flow of change be redirected, not just in whaling but in other industries as well.

Whitney’s brief mention of whaling, however, was less significant than his outright defense of free labor. Whitney thought that the railroad would create an independent class of free men, citizens who were not dependent on anyone or any institution–in other words, who were not enslaved. The railroad workers would be laborers for a transitional period only, as they would inevitably set up in homesteads along the railroad line. Working on the railroad would be a stepping stone for immigrants to move toward independence. Whitney’s long commentary to assuage any concerns about the problem of immigrant laborers, especially Irish and Germans, reveals just how widespread these concerns were. White Americans, especially Northerners, thought that racial difference, dependency, and destitution spawned slavery and threatened government.

The Pequod sets sail with a crew from all corners of the earth. With Captain Ahab at the helm the ship plunges forward into the seas with one overriding purpose, to hunt the one white whale in the ocean and exercise vengeance on it, casting aside all concerns for individuals who might alter this course. The crew includes Ishmael, the New England adventurer, his bunkmate Queequeg, a dark-skinned South Pacific islander, a man who came from a place “not down on any map.” As well as Pip, the young cabin boy, possibly born a slave, possibly free born.

“Who ain’t the slave,” Melville’s main narrator and protagonist Ishmael reminds us. Andrew Delbanco’s recent biography of Melville (Melville, His World and Work, Knopf 2005) stresses the importance of slavery for Melville’s outlook in the years he wrote Moby Dick. The Pequod’s labor system was not terribly different from slavery in its force, brutality, danger, and punishment. Delbanco compares it to the American army and the construction crews used to build the American railroads and canals of the 1850s and earlier. Melville in Moby Dick tells us of the terrible consequences of enslavement and power. What Ahab wants are tools, to do his work and to bend to his indomitable will. What he has on his ship are men, of course, but they are used in Ahab’s service nonetheless.

Like the leviathan, slavery proved remarkably difficult to render accurately. It was almost impossible to paint a portrait of such a diverse, global, exploitative, and complex institution. Killing it would lose its “undulations.” Nevertheless, the only way to get a fair picture of the whale–or perhaps slavery–was to go “a whaling yourself.”

April 4, 2008

The Story of Sarah Sim and Women’s Experience on the Great Plains in the 1850s

Filed under: Podcasts, Uncategorized, social experience, women — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:11 pm

Sarah Sim and her husband Francis Sim migrated to Otoe County, Nebraska Territory, in 1856 to start a farm. Their trials and travails included the death of three of their children, the near suicide of Sarah, and the difficulties of moving to and farming in the Great Plains in the 1850s. Their letters are online at The Railroads and the Making of Modern America. This podcast with Will Thomas and Leslie Working explores the significance of these letters and of the Sims’ experience in the years before the Civil War.

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