The Roots of Modern America Blog

July 7, 2009

Re-examining South Carolina’s Secession–the story of the Blue Ridge Railroad

Filed under: Civil War, U. S. South, slavery, technology — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 10:14 am

If we are to explain South Carolina’s secession in 1860, we might look more closely at its fractious legislative struggle over railroad development. South Carolina, like Virginia and Georgia, embarked on major railroad projects aided by state finances and backing. These projects aimed to break the mountain barriers separating them from the rest of the South and fulfill the idea that Nature favored their region, a persistent theme in the late 1850s among Southern expansionists. It became an important refrain in the years leading up to secession. The political implications of the notion could not be ignored: they hinged on what Nature bestowed and how people reconfigured Nature to their own advantages. The basis for most of these claims came from the experience with railroads. Up and down the mountainous chain separating the seaboard from the interior, projects got underway in the 1850s to break through Nature’s barriers and substitute for them a second Nature of rails, tunnels, embankments, grades, and structures.

The South Carolina Blue Ridge Rail Road, for example, was planned to connect Charleston to the west across the mountains, much like the Virginia project to tunnel through the Blue Ridge and the Baltimore and Ohio’s effort to break through the Alleghenies. For South Carolina the stakes placed on the Blue Ridge Railroad were especially high and so were the expectations. The road’s new president, Edward Frost, a Charleston attorney turned railroad investor, argued that once built the railroad would reshape the geography of the state and that “Charleston will then be 46 miles nearer to Knoxville than Richmond and 96 miles nearer than Savannah.” Both of these rival cities with their railroads had drawn off the trade from the West and left South Carolina imprisoned by its mountains. He urged that stockholders and legislators to look at a map and they will see that “without the Blue Ridge Road, Charleston and South Carolina have little opportunity of sharing in the advantages of a commercial connection with the navigable waters of the West.” In fact, Frost argued, the neighboring states constructed railroads that “belt” South Carolina and once North Carolina completed its work “then the cordon of railroads around South Carolina will be complete and close.”1

If the state was about to be shut off from the modern commercial economy developing on its very borders, enabled by the railroad’s capacity to conquer nature, then South Carolina, according to Frost, had the opportunity to open itself up. He would not predict the Blue Ridge Railroad’s earning potential once it was completed because the importance of the road would be measured “by the trade which it will, in time, attract.” He pointed out instead that other railroads outperformed even their most optimistic projections and he concluded that a maxim could be drawn from these comparisons: “railroads create the trade they need.”

The idea was alluring. It went beyond confidence or optimism. It was understood as a kind of natural, economic, and technological law whose operations were in effect whether the citizens of a state or city wished it or not. Frost pointed out that wheat traveled 456 miles from Knoxville to Richmond, and much of it further to Baltimore. “Why may not Columbia, having advantages of water power greater than Richmond, and as favorably situated, not manufacture wheat, with a carriage from Knoxville of 321 miles?” Frost asked.

South Carolina’s isolated position on the ever-changing map of railroad growth in the 1850s worried Frost. He cautioned his stockholders as well as the public and the legislature that the state was one of the smallest “in territory and one of the least in white population, while it is one of the wealthiest, of the Southern States.” Only “moral force and character” had allowed it to remain a leader, but railroads and the reconfiguration of the South with them threatened South Carolina’s position, and presumably its wealth. The Blue Ridge, he argued, was too large in scale for private capital to complete. The railroad was a “great national highway, uniting the geographical divisions of the continent, across the great mountain barrier which separates them.” And railroads of this magnitude, including those already built by neighboring states and others under construction, “superseded” every other mode of trade. “Commerce is no longer dependent on the natural advantages of sites at the estuaries of large streams,” Frost maintained, “Even the Mississippi cannot protect New Orleans from the successful rivalry of railroads.”2

Despite the excitement and progress on the Blue Ridge tunnels and tracks in 1858, the road again needed more capital by the end of the year. Frost and the company’s directors appealed to the state legislature to amend the original charter and authorize another one million dollars in state aid and bonds. The fight in the Legislature over the Blue Ridge Railroad funding grew heated and intense debate followed. Men who had supported every other railroad in the state turned against the Blue Ridge. They maintained that the road was too expensive and too speculative, that it could never pay for itself, and that if private capital could not be raised then the state should not built it. Supporters held that the state debt would not be materially affected by an additional two million dollars, that the state could (and probably should) raise taxes, and that other southern states were taking on similar levels of state aid. They pointed to Georgia which invested $5 million in the Western, and Virginia which spent $3 million on its Blue Ridge Railroad and Tunnel and was busy undertaking a $12 million project on the Covington & Ohio. Besides, the bill’s proponents argued, the State legislature was already spending $3 million on a lavish new state house widely seen as an extravagance.3

When the legislature of South Carolina voted to withhold continued public support for the Blue Ridge Rail Road in late 1858, all of the work on the railroad and the tunnel stopped. The Charleston Mercury mocked the legislature and the railroad’s critics as shortsighted and foolish. Who would not “feel ashamed” of the “inconsistency and irresolution” that the state “has exhibited before the world?” the Mercury asked. Too many of the state’s leaders, it argued, were measuring the impact of the railroad “by the little pocket rule of immediate dividends.” Instead, “we look upon it as a project on a grander scale, and destined to confer measureless benefits–social, political, and commercial.”4 In the South Carolina House, Christopher Memminger argued that “modern nations,” like the ancient Greeks and Romans before them, build monuments to “their genius and enterprise,” but the abandonment of the Blue Ridge left “half finished tunnels,” “crumbling bridges, and ruined cuts through hills and mountains” as a monument to the state’s “inconstancy and feebleness.” Whether South Carolina could avoid isolation and encirclement and join the rapidly evolving Southern railroad commercial network remained an open question after 1859. In the coming years South Carolina’s desperate need for a unified South only grew more pronounced.5

The prominent railroad engineer and friend of John C. Calhoun, A. H. Brisbane was appalled at the turn of events. Brisbane asked his South Carolina readers what Calhoun would think if the state did not support the railroad to connect to the rest of the South. Calhoun was its first visionary and “to the hour of his death its unceasing supporter.” Brisbane appealed to those who voted against the state support to reconsider their position and to ponder Calhoun’s legacy. Could it be, he wondered, “they have already forgotten the man whose reputation, even now when he is dead, is defending them in their dearest rights.”6

To white South Carolinians, Brisbane’s reference to rights could mean only one thing: the right to hold slave property. To be sure that they understood Calhoun’s linkage between these rights and the railroad economy he hoped to develop in the South, Brisbane conjured up the Calhoun who had walked the passes of South Carolina and Georgia and who in planning the route with Brisbane circled Rabun Gap on a map and exclaimed: “There is your gap, there is the great pass; there the mountains recede . . . as though they invited the States of this great confederacy to pass and repair them.” Calhoun had great faith that the railroad would bring the South to “the gates of Cincinnati” and that even though “we may fail sir, in our endeavors now, but the result must come, and our industrial independence be secured by this boon of Providence–this inexplicable pass, through a mighty range of mountains, unless for some great moral purpose, such as is now proposed.”

In this context South Carolina had a choice, according to Edward Frost, the railroad’s president. It could go forward with the Blue Ridge Railroad, bore through the mountains, and reap the potential advantages of altering nature’s barriers, or it could “recede from the position of moral eminence she has heretofore occupied, and be reconciled to a diminution of her political power and consequence proportioned to her territorial area.”7

The choice was implied for the South as well. The language, ideas, and practices of the local conflict could jump tracks and become an important resource in the South’s claim to nationhood. City and state rivalries within the South translated arguments easily to the sectional or national competition. South Carolina’s leading men were aware of the consequences of their state’s isolation. And although conservative Democrats remained suspicious of state development schemes, enough to finally block the Blue Ridge’s financing in 1859, the questions raised by the railroad projects were profoundly significant for South Carolina. They indicated the ways railroads were reconfiguring the nation’s borders, geography, and commerce. The debates in South Carolina coming as they did on the eve of the 1860 presidential election, moreover, rehearsed a series of arguments that would emerge in the following year over the best means to ensure the South’s future wealth and independence. They also revealed the slow process of reshaping identities. Because the railroads connected places, linked subregions, and crossed natural barriers, their potential prompted a series of questions for those who supported and opposed them: what is our region, who are our allies, and where are we going?

Notes and Sources:

1 “Report of the President and Directors and of the Chief Engineer to the Annual Meeting of the Stockholders of The Blue Ridge Railroad Company, in South Carolina, held in Charleston, the 10th of November 1858,” The Charleston Mercury, November 13, 1858, Issue 10,388, Col. B.

2 “Report of the President and Directors and of the Chief Engineer to the Annual Meeting of the Stockholders of The Blue Ridge Railroad Company, in South Carolina, held in Charleston, the 10th of November 1858,” The Charleston Mercury, November 13, 1858, Issue 10,388, Col. B.

3 For a collection of criticisms, see the series of articles by “Nolumus” in The Charleston Mercury in “The Blue Ridge Railroad” Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. “The Blue Ridge Railroad Enterprise,” The Charleston Mercury, December 30, 1858, Issue 10,427, Col. C.

4 “The Blue Ridge Railroad Enterprise,” The Charleston Mercury, December 28, 1858, Issue 10,425, Col. C.

5 “Speech of C. G. Memminger, Esq. In the House of Representatives, of the Bill to Afford Aid to the Blue Ridge Railroad,” The Charleston Mercury, January 10, 1859, Issue 10,436, Col. C.

6 “General Brisbane’s Compliments to the conductors of the Press,” Charleston Mercury, June 1, 1859, Issue 10,558, Col. D in Nineteenth Century U. S. Newspapers. See also, Betty L. Plisco, The Rocky Road to Nowhere: a History of the Blue Ridge Railroad in South Carolina, 1850-1861 (Salem, SC: Blue Granite Books, 2002): 69-73.

7 “Report of the President and Directors and of the Chief Engineer to the Annual Meeting of the Stockholders of The Blue Ridge Railroad Company, in South Carolina, held in Charleston, the 10th of November 1858,” The Charleston Mercury, November 13, 1858, Issue 10,388, Col. B.

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.

January 9, 2009

Civil War Loyalty Tests on the Railroads

Filed under: Civil War, technology, women — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 8:30 am

On July 12, 1864 an anonymous letter was forwarded to the military commander of the Union forces around Nashville, Tennessee, and then on to Colonel A. Anderson, the General Superintendent of the United States Military Railroad (U.S.M.R.R.) in that district. Because the U.S.M.R.R. was such an important link to General William T. Sherman’s army as it fought its way south and east toward Atlanta, and because southern guerrillas were constantly endangering the vulnerable rail lines, Anderson and his superiors could take no chances. He was directed to “have the loyalty of all his employees tested.”

Loyalty to the Union was declared through an oath and the swearer simply signed a statement, but the idea that loyalties were not only tested but also monitored in the Ciivl War is one that we have sometimes lost sight of. The boundaries between North and South seem to us so clear and incontrovertible that such measures would appear unnecessary. Yet, in the Civil War, especially in East Tennessee, the boundaries were blurred. Huge armies fought in the war, but at the local level the conflict was more personal.

The anonymous letter seemed to include plans for spying on the Union Army, and outlined the “best way to get to the rebels news.” Specifically, the recipient was directed to go to the “Huntsville Depot” and contact the letter writer’s mother. Because the Union  Provost Marshall boarded with her, she had never been denied a pass–or one for her friends. From there the spy was directed to go 7 miles where there “lives a woman who permits the rebels to go to and from her house at will.” 

He also provided directions on “how to save self when the guerrillas shoot into the Rail Road trains.” The man worked on the railroad and generally “knows when they [the guerrillas] are about.” Through signals and some advance warning, he knew when the attacks would occur. So, his protocol was to fill the engine furnace full of wood then lay down “behind the wood in such a way as to be safe.” Whenever he saw a guerrilla he recognized but does “not want to speak” for fear he would be exposed, he would shake his head.

Angry and tired of working on the railroad for the Union forces, this man expected to run off and join a Confederate cavalry unit. He cheered the work of the guerrillas, especially John Hunt Morgan, and was pleased to report that “there is scarce a nightbut what there are more less union men killed along the railroad.” As for the woman who provided the safe house for spies: ”Mrs. Holman is a true woman of the Confederacy,” the man noted.  

The Union Army faced a significant counterinsurgency challenge in large parts of the Confederacy. The railroads, however, because of their size and complexity were run by thousands of civilians rather than controlled directly by military commanders. The railroads were quasi-military operations, necessary to control and manage but beyond the capacity or expertise of any given regimental officer. Few men in the Union Army needed loyalty testing, but the civilians associated with the railroads were another matter. So, the response to this intercepted communique to test the loyalty of the employees on the railroad was not unexpected, but the use of the rail system in war brought a new dimension of scale, reach, and vulnerability and made the conflict a more modern one. 

[The letter is from: National Archives and Records Administration, Letters Received by A. Anderson, Gen. Sup.  Record Group 92 subgroup 1674 Box 2.]

September 9, 2008

An Update from London

Filed under: Civil War — Tags: , , , , , , — wthomas @ 6:40 am

My posts will resume this week after a few weeks off to travel to the U.K.–next installments will be on American foreign policy in the Civil War, the subject of my current research in London at the British Library and The Rothschild Archive.The global capital market expanded in the 19th century and it was especially  important in the development of the American South and Midwest. It is striking that of the nearly 30,000 miles of railroad track in the United States in 1860, over 22,000 of it were laid in the 1850s, nearly all of it in the South and Midwest. These two regions dominated the boom of the 1850s. British and European capital financed a significant amount of this expansion. Their relative experience in these years and through the Panic of 1857 shaped their identities as much as the political crisis over slavery. In the coming weeks we’ll look at these questions in more detail. 

July 29, 2008

Why Did Virginia Secede?

Filed under: Civil War, U. S. South, politics, slavery — Tags: , , , , — wthomas @ 5:04 pm

Today it seems almost inconceivable. Eleven states, in the Southern region of the United States, called constitutional conventions and in a matter of months formally withdrew from the nation. In breathtaking speed they had established an entirely new and separate nation with a capital at Montgomery, Alabama. What made this possible?

After all, secession seems entirely counterintuitive. Why would the most wealthy individuals, the men with the most to lose in society, risk everything, including slavery, as well as their lives, peace, property, prosperity, position, and inheritance? Why would they knowingly bring on a war with the United States by creating a new and risky republic in the South, and then throw everything into its defense until their capital lay in ruins, their population half-starved, and every army battered into total submission? 

Historian and leading scholar of the Civil War, James McPherson answers that secession was a “counter-revolution” not a “revolution.” White southerners, he argues, saw the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party as the revolutionaries. The move to secede was a counter-revolution, a conservative  effort designed to protect what they had and stem the tide of change sweeping across the nation. All of their resistance, he argues, was aimed at maintaining slavery and their position in society. To McPherson the answer is straightforward–they saw a greater risk in the Union and perceived themselves as the inheritors of the true republican virtues of the Revolution. Their new republic was, therefore, modeled on the “union as it was” before the slavery issue threatened their principles and prosperity. McPherson indicates that the South was in a way seeking to turn back the clock or at least stop time. Their vision was not progressive but regressive. 

When you read the four volumes of The Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, or an updated history of what the southern delegates said to the Virginia convention (Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion), however, a number of further considerations become equally important. Virginia, of course, included West Virginia at the time and so delegates came from the far western, mountainous counties too where slavery was less prominent. The convention met for weeks in Richmond and those favoring immediate secession maneuvered to keep the convention in session, hoping for a dramatic event that might tip the votes their way. Eventually, the got their wish, as President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from Virginia and the other states after the firing on Fort Sumter. Lincoln clearly intended to suppress secession in the South and Virginia’s delegates voted the next day 88-55 to secede with the South and join the Confederacy.

Let’s reconsider, though, what these delegates said. 

First, not a single Virginia delegate criticized slavery. Indeed, many of the western delegates were slaveholders and those that did not spoke in support of the institution. No delegate wanted to be branded an abolitionist. Delegates outdid one another to voice their commitment to slavery. Slavery and its protection was clearly in the forefront of their motivations.

Second, slavery was not just an abstract or political issue, but one that for these white men was centered on “property.” When Thomas Branch of Petersburg offered his constituents’ views in the form of a resolution to the Convention, it was to affirm that “negro slaves are property.” Somehow, these white Southerners thought, the North had lost sense of slavery as a form of property and needed to be reminded of the bare, essential nature of the rights the South was going to defend. Branch for his part only needed to state that he would represent the will of his constituents and that meant immediate secession.

Third, the debates read as if they took place outside of time, and indicate that the delegates, however duly constituted, had few ways to articulate what was happening in the spirit of the white South. Despite the fast pace of events and the complex political and diplomatic issues at stake, the Virginia delegates spent hours and days parsing words such as “sovereignty” and “person” and “vital” and “social institution.” The delegates gave long-winded explications of constitutional history and read into the record as evidence the speeches, letters, and proclamations of Lincoln, New York U. S. Senator William H. Seward, Massachusetts U.S. Senator Henry Wilson, and others. There was remarkably little discussion of the real events taking place, the possibilities of war, the nature of the conflict, or the resources at their command. The delegates were assembled to debate “secession” as a legal right and to craft an ordinance that would tender Virginia’s withdrawal from the United States of America.

Fourth, despite the close votes in February 1861 and the reluctance of some to cause a war, the majority of these delegates already understood themselves as part of a Southern, modern nation on equal footing with the North, as well as Britain, France, Russia, and Italy. Indeed, a number of delegates placed the idea of the Confederacy in the context of newly forming nation-states in Europe. They saw themselves as part of the vanguard of modern state formation. Their sense of Southern progress, civilization, and modernity may be the most surprising aspect of the debates.

This last point is critical. The state conventions and legal machinations that flowed from them structured the debates over secession in very specific and circumscribed ways, especially in Virginia. Unlike the deep South states where the procedures moved quickly in December 1860, Virginia with its long history of Revolutionary heritage stood in the breach for months, the decisive tipping point, and the Virginia delegates knew it. It was no wonder they acted cautiously.

Only when we take the debates for what they were–a constitutional forum burdened with the history of Virginia’s role in the United States–can we begin to see the underlying frameworks that made secession not only possible but likely. The view of slaves, of course, as property offered the decisive common ground for these white Virginians. But confidence was equally important. Not confidence in a constitutional right worthy of defense, but instead confidence in the capacity to hold up a modern nation-state on the world stage. In this respect nothing about Virginia’s secession might be considered counter-revolutionary. “Nations act on their interests,” one Virginia delegate argued, “not on their sentiments.” (Vol. II, p. 673)

The idea itself is strikingly modern. As for the South, and indeed Virginia, it could not do otherwise if it purported to be a nation, to be sovereign to itself, to be a civilization worthy of the world’s respect. “It is a fact, Mr. Chairman,” the delegate concluded, “that there is a separate national existence at Montgomery.” (Vol. II, p. 675) The question was when, not if, Virginia would join it.

July 21, 2008

Top Five Summer History Tours–Virginia

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 10:50 am

Where do you go to find the best history? There are so many choices! Museums, battlefields, exhibits, galleries, and walking tours. It is summertime and that means a chance to explore American history sites and tours. Sometimes, we experience the past more directly when we walk through an old house or see a historical object or stand in a historical place. This feeling is something that children experience intensely as they begin to see that they are part of a continuous flow of time and space, and they are often especially willing to be “transported” in time through history. So, take your children and visit a historic place this summer. 

This week we feature Virginia. Next we will cover New England, and then the West.

Here are my top five places or sites this summer for an encounter with history that really means something (with a brief explanation why)–Jamestown, the Moton civil rights museum, Monticello, Chancellorsville battlefield, and the Tredegar Civil War Center and Museum: 

1. Jamestown

American colonial history really begins at Jamestown, the first permanent English colony, settled in 1607 (much earlier than Plymouth). Here, on the James River in the great Chesapeake Bay, English, Indian (Algonquian), and African societies encountered one another at the edge of what some are now calling “the Atlantic World.” The place is undeniably important and you can stand right in the ruins.

Go to the Island first, the original site of the fort: what is called Jamestown Rediscovery. Begin there not the Jamestown Settlement reproduction and museum nearby. The island is owned jointly by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). The history-making archaeological dig underway at the island, led by William Kelso, has discovered the original Jamestown fort, and this work is transforming the way historians think about the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. You can tour the dig as well as the new, beautifully displayed artifacts at the “Archaearium” (that’s right). The Archaearium display is a powerful look at the work of archaeologists and features the process of what happened in the dig at Jamestown Fort.  Although the exhibit at the Archaearium downplays English-Indian conflict too much, and generally does not explain the Algonquian experience, children will be fascinated with the artifacts that Kelso and his team uncovered. The well, into which Jamestown’s first colonists seemed to have thrown everything, is a marvel.

The experience of standing in the original footprint of the fort along the James River is powerful. You can look right down the river and see where the signal posts were to guard the tiny colony from any approaching Spanish fleet. Because Spain’s military governor in Havana had sailed right into the Chesapeake in 1571 to search for a missing Jesuit mission and because Roman Catholic Spain was Protestant England’s enemy on the seas, the idea of a Spanish attack was not fanciful. The line of sight down the James River today from the fort is still remarkably unbroken by modern structures, so the effect of this view is well worth the trip. 

The Jamestown Yorktown Foundation’s site (The Settlement) and its museum and reproduction of the fort is near Jamestown Island, and its exhibits are also worth visiting. Although many visitors think this is the original site, you should bear in mind that the entire creation is a reproduction, and if you have visited the original site first you will not be confused about this. The Settlement exhibit includes a carefully reproduced Algonquian village. Living historical actors dress in Indian clothing and use Indian implements to cook, grow corn, and treat deer hides. Although children may find the site fascinating for this reason and although the huts and equipment are reproduced faithfully (largely based on the drawings by John White from 1585 and the writings of John Smith that describe Indian towns and structures in some detail), the site is placed so close to the fort that it appears as if Indians lived next door to and in feudal vassalage to the English fort’s colonists. They did not, of course. The best part of the Settlement is the reproduction ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery. 

Before any tour of Jamestown you might look online at the biggest archive of Jamestown materials, The Virtual Jamestown Project. Here you can read John Smith’s accounts, letters from the period, and important original documents.

2. The Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County

This site is a historic place in the Civil Rights Movement, and the little museum is a gem. In 1951 students at the segregated, black Robert Russa Moton High School staged a strike to demand that the school board build a new black high school. The leader of the student strike, Barbara Johns, organized the student body to walk out of school down to the county building and make their demands known. The students did not go back to school for several weeks as they sat out “on strike.” The event prompted civil rights attorney Oliver Hill to visit the community, and he and the NAACP eventually took on the case. The case became one of the five included in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In reaction to the landmark Brown decision striking down segregated schools, local white leaders in Prince Edward County shut off all funding for public schools and closed the schools rather than integrate them. The schools remained closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964. These circumstances make the site especially important and dramatic. You can stand in the small, cramped auditorium where Barbara Johns rallied the students for the strike and see the “tar paper shacks” that the school erected because it had no funds. The effects of segregated schools become instantly clear and the improbable effects of the student strike of 1951 intensely felt.

You should contact the Moton Museum before going to make sure of its hours. You can walk from the museum on the same roads that the students took when they walked en masse in May 1951 down to the county office building. This one mile walk past the historic black church where NAACP meetings were held gives you an important view of the early beginnings of the civil rights movement. I encountered this story through the work on original films from local television stations–you can see these films too and look at the Prince Edward situation at: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/civilrightstv.

3. Monticello

There are few places like this in the United States. Any summer history tour should visit the historic home of Thomas Jefferson. His epigraph says it all, or at least all he wanted to say about himself: “author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Founder of the University of Virginia.” President for two terms, Secretary of State, Envoy to France, Governor of Virginia, and political party founder, Jefferson could claim much more on his tombstone. He valued liberty, religious freedom, and learning above all. Of course, he designed his home at Monticello in the middle of all of this, and it is an exquisite statement of his values and aspirations for the nation.

Monticello has firmly placed slavery in the story of Jefferson and his life. The site includes tours of the slave living and working sites, and the team of archaeologists and historians are continually uncovering new evidence about this experience. Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings is clearly explained and affirmed in the tours. Slavery, freedom, and the political basis of the American republic were at the heart of Jefferson’s life and experiences. Jefferson’s wrestling with all three are on display in the design of Monticello and the material objects found there. Jefferson had great faith in us, the generations to come after him in the American republic. And it is humbling to be reminded just how much faith he had and how much trust he placed in our democracy.

4. Chancellorsville Battlefield

No summer history tour is complete without a Civil War battlefield experience. There are, sadly, many to choose from. The war tore through the heart of America and killed hundreds of thousands. It is far too easy to forget the consequences of war and to glorify set-piece battles as if they were played like a game. But when you visit a battlefield and see the ground on which armies fought, the war and its destruction take on a new meaning.

The great battlefields include Gettysburg, Petersburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Manassas, and of course Chancellorsville. All are run by the National Park Service and have extensive, high quality historical interpretation. You will find expert park rangers and historians at all of them.

I chose Chancellorsville for several reasons. First, the battlefield landscape is rapidly changing, as housing developments, golf courses, and commercial strip malls have taken the place of farms, fields, and barns. It is increasingly difficult to see the battlefield, so go now.

Second, the battle was huge, extending over dozens of square miles and had tremendous importance in the flow of the war, giving the Confederacy vitality and energy at a key turning point. The best tour is to begin at Zoar Baptist Church where Stonewall Jackson’s troops first encountered Hooker’s Federal forces and in the first hours of the engagement changed the dynamic of the battle with an aggressive attack. Then, you can follow Jackson’s long march route around the Federal right flank and his surprise attack on the 11th Corps. You can do this in a car, but on bike is also fun. And if you take a car, stop along the way and get out to walk the route because the Wilderness effect is still there. Another good walk to do is the short distance from the Hazel Grove to the Chancellor House ruins. The high ground of the Hazel Grove and the open sight lines to the House give you a sense of the desperate stakes in the artillery battle there.

5. The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar

Tredegar Iron Works cast iron before the Civil War for railroads and during the war supplied the Confederacy with much of its cannon and other armaments and ammunition. The works were extensive and have been preserved in downtown Richmond. Few sites give a feel for the work of nineteenth-century industry and how it operated. Tredegar holds added importance because so many slaves were employed in heavy industry here. The Civil War center has been dedicated to explain the experiences of Confederate, Union, and African-American soldiers and civilians in the Civil War. Few museums attempt such an interwoven set of exhibits. And few treat the experience of the U.S. Colored Troops with any degree of completeness, but Tredegar has made that effort its main mission. Although the exhibits are useful, informative, and interesting, the grounds, buildings, and equipment at Tredegar offer visitors a window into the nineteenth century and into the machinery that was at the heart of the Civil War and its destructiveness. You will not be disappointed.

So, enjoy these great sites. Next, we take a tour of New England and then the West for the best summer sites to visit.

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 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 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.”

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