Author: William Thomas (page 13 of 21)

William G. Thomas III is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities. He teaches digital humanities and digital history, 19th century U.S. history, the Civil War, and the history of slavery.

March 26, 2011

A Visit to “Menokin”

On Thursday, my family took a drive over to “Menokin,” the historic home of Francis Lightfoot Lee in Richmond County, Virginia. Lee was a signer of the Declaration of the Independence, a slaveholder, and a leading figure in the Virginia gentry at the time of the Revolution. Our tour was led by Sarah Pope, the Executive Director of the Menokin Foundation. The foundation aims to preserve the historic home and develop a teaching program around the site.

What’s remarkable is first, that we know so little about Francis Lightfoot Lee, and second that the home sat unoccupied for as long as it did. Martin Kirwan King has generously donated support to restore the home and begin conservation work. Any scholar working on the Revolutionary period looking for a dissertation topic or a Master’s thesis topic might consider writing about Francis Lee. The archaeological dig in and around the home have revealed important details of 18th century Virginia life. The slave quarters and other outbuildings have yet to be fully documented and uncovered.

Lee held 47 people in bondage and his will offers us a small window into the gentry world and into slavery. It provided that after his wife’s death, “all the said negroes, furniture and what my remain of the other articles mentioned in this clause to my nephew Ludwell Lee, second son of my Brother Richard Henry Lee, forever.” But Lee went further, holding that if Rebecca Lee removed herself from Menokin, then the sale of “the negroes” would follow. In other words, Lee contemplated without question or concern the breakup of slave families and lives–what Walter Johnson has called “the chattel principle.” He also mentioned only one slave by name: Cate, the maid of his wife Rebecca. But he did so, only because his will provided that Rebecca might choose to take her dower, rather than the 250 British pounds sterling a year his will provided for her, and if so, then Cate could be exempted from the estate and held in the dower. This was common, but it never ceases to amaze us on cold (re)reading–the clutch of the slavery system, the grip on the future lives of the enslaved through such legal documents. The Foundation will need more research to discover the material, social, and religious lives of all the people working at and around Menokin, and the history of this gentry world. The recent book by Melvyn Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox , tells the story of a Virginia gentry Richard Randolph and his remarkable will which freed his slaves after the Revolution and set them up on a 400-acre piece of land. Comparing the will of Richard Randolph and Francis Lightfoot Lee, one wonders how we can reconcile them, the former inspired by the ideals of the Revolution freed the slaves he inherited, the latter a signer of the Declaration of Independence bound slaves even more tightly in enslavement to his kinsmen.

The house is a beautiful structure and a thoroughly pleasing architectural design. The original plans, amazingly, were discovered only recently. They included two buildings–an office and a kitchen–now utterly collapsed. The overall project is of unquestioned importance, and I expect we will be learning more about Lee in the coming years.

The Foundation has already developed an architectural conservation program and an environmental conservation program, as well as a solid set of web resources for further research.

To give a sense of the project and its scope:

Stone recovered from the Menokin foundation, 2011.

The view of the front entrance to Menokin, 2011.

In front of the main house, 2011.

For more photographs and materials visit the Foundation’s photographic collections.

March 23, 2011

At the Library of Virginia: Looking for Mima Queen

After a coffee with Edward L. Ayers this morning (much excitement in Richmond with two teams in the NCAA final 16), I am at the Library of Virginia finishing the citations and edits for The Iron Way: Railroads, The Civil War, and the Making of Modern America.

But I can’t help looking ahead to my next project. I’m calling it “The Petition.” I’ve pulled the correspondence of John Randolph and Francis Scott Key in 1813. Key tried the Mima Queen case before the U. S. Supreme Court that year. There are nine letters in this file from him to Randolph. Will any of them mention the Queen case? Does her petition for freedom come up in their discussions? How can I reconstruct the case and its remarkable history? I’m looking forward to writing this early history of Washington, DC, slavery and freedom.

On a completely different subject, Ed Ayers and I agreed that we need to have a Valley Project team reunion and a session at the #AHA2011 in Chicago on the Valley of the Shadow and its progeny. Looking forward to that already.

March 19, 2011

#OAH2011

In Houston, TX at the Organization of American Historians Conference, I have enjoyed catching with with friends and colleagues. I had a wonderful talk with Elizabeth R. Varon and heard about my friends at the University of Virginia, where she is now teaching Southern history. And she gave me some helpful advice on my next book project. I’m going to write about slavery and freedom in early Washington, D.C., and in particular at the case and family history of Mima Queen. The main focus will be on the Queens, and the case, which Francis Scott Key tried in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1813, and John Marshall decided. This was a petition for freedom case, and among other things established the “hearsay rule” in American law. I’ve found new documents on the case, and Liz, not surprisingly, had great suggestions for how to begin to uncover this story. The book will tell the story of early Washington, black and white, and through the lives of three generations of Queen women–Mary Queen, Mima Queen, and Louisa Queen.

The OAH session on Quantitative History revealed how historians are using new techniques of Social Network Analysis, ones that I plan to use in my next work on early Washington. Karen Wilson’s work on networks of Jewish business men and families in Los Angeles opened my eyes to how these techniques might be applied to my project on the Queens.

Melinda Miller (U.S.N.A.) explained why forty acres and a mule would indeed have made a difference in the lives of freedmen after the Civil War. Her brilliant analysis compares Cherokee Freedmen with Southern black freedmen.

And we had a mini-reunion of Valley of the Shadow folks, including Anne S. Rubin, Andrew Torget, and Amy Murrell Taylor. Missing Ed Ayers, but he was probably watching University of Richmond Spiders advance in the NCAAs.

The meeting also allowed my research team for our Railroads Digging into Data project to meet with Richard White and his Spatial History team from Stanford, including Erik Steiner and Kathy Harris. We hoped going into the meeting to drive “the golden spike” between our respective railroad data projects. No champagne, no worker strikes, no Thomas C. Durant. But we made major progress on how we might join our data and tools and collaborate on a future project. Our Aurora Engine framework for spatio-temporal visualization and analysis might be at least a common gauge–to use a railroad term.

And Oxford University Press put out The Old South’s Modern Worlds, with an excellent essay by Michael O’Brien among others.

March 12, 2011

Place History: A conversation with Phil Ethington and Eric Sanderson

On March 10th and 11th, Philip Ethington (Hypercities) and Eric Sanderston (Mannahatta Project) visited the University of Nebraska, guests of the Plains Humanities Alliance and the Department of History.

Sanderson explained the remarkable and detailed mapping of Manhattan by the British, and the ecological and geological structures underlying the city. He argues that these forms and forces continue to have meaning and relevance in our lives, even if they remain distinctly out of sight. Sanderson has undertaken a massive project to map the layers of Manhattan’s ecology and infrastructure successively through four centuries. He’s been featured at TED, in The New Yorker, and in National Geographic. And the project is indeed exciting, especially the idea of reconstructing the rivers and islands of the region in 1609 as Henry Hudson would have encountered them.

But it is his long duration outlook that I find most appealing. A 400-year history of a region, a river, a place, and all that it contains.

Ethington, for his part, has undertaken a 12,000 year digital history of Los Angeles and does so by describing the way people have “inscribed” their beliefs, institutions, technologies, and ideas on the landscape. Ethington’s “deep historical regionalism” emphasizes the continuing influence of past “inscriptions” in the land, leading him to term his brand of urban history, a “ghost metropolis.” Both Ethington and Sanderson suggest the many ways that spaces places have, create, and perpetuate meaning, the many cracks and crevasses where places hold history. If want to know about the past, we should look at the ground beneath our feet.

March 4, 2011

Reflections on James Agee and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”

It has been seventy years since James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and yet their work speaks across the decades, powerful, moving, poignant, gripping, exhausting, blazingly brilliant. I taught this book again last week for the first time in a long while in a graduate seminar. And I was struck by how much historians have to learn from Agee still. It may be at first glance that Agee’s obsession with being a “spy” is the stuff of drama, comical in its overreach or pathetic in its self-absorption. Certainly, some of my students saw it this way.

But Agee, “a spy traveling as a journalist,” brings us into the world of cotton tenancy in such vivid detail and with such excruciating emotion and with such fidelity and honor and care and love, that we have to pay attention. We have to sit still and listen, to every sentence, every colon, every comma, every gesture. What can we learn as historians from Agee now? Certainly, we can aspire to the hyper-awareness of power and the drama of power relations in his opening scenes “Late Sunday Morning,” “At the Forks,” and “Near a Church.” He was “sick in the knowledge that they felt they were here at our demand, mine and Walker’s, and that I could communicate nothing otherwise; and now, in a perversion of self-torture, I played my part through. I gave their leader fifty cents, trying at the same time through my eyes, to communicate much more.” (31) Agee tells us about his “impulse” to “throw myself flat on my face and embrace and kiss their feet” until he realizes that such a demonstration of love or allegiance or forgiveness or repentance would only terrify the black couple he was asking directions.

The book is in its way a hypertext–arranged in ways for the reader to move across and within it, shifting time, event, impression, and voice. But at the center of all of it is Agee’s struggle to tell about the past. “It seems likely at this stage,” he writes about in the middle of the book, “that the truest way to treat a piece of the past is as such: as if it were no longer the present.” Instead of “chronological progression,” Agee decides that the “‘truest’ thing about the experience” is “rather as it turns up in recall, in no such order, casting its lights and associations forward and backward upon the then past and the then future, across that expanse of experience.” (244)

More than anything, Agee was deeply aware of his own presence in the lives of his subjects, and he was ashamed of his complicity in their exploitation. It is a humbling lesson for any historian. We traffic in stories, in lives, and in histories, and we carry out our work often unaware of the potential for misperception, misjudgment, and mistake. Agee considered the camera “a weapon, a stealer of images and souls, a gun, an evil-eye.” (362) When he meets Annie Mae Gudger for the first time, Agee is painfully aware of her: “you, Annie Mae, whose name I do not yet know, and whom I have never yet seen, and who I gather, are George’s wife (though there has been no foolishness of ‘introductions,’ nor any word spoken, of any such kind): it is you I was first aware of from when I first came into this room, before you were yet a shadow out of the darkness, and you I have had on my mind while we have sat here, and so much cared toward.” (398)

Seventy years later we still need Agee: his precision, his language, his poetic rendering, his documentary methods, his passionate care for his subjects, and his soul searching introspection. We need his honesty. And we need his humility.

Source: all quotes from James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, with an introduction to the new edition by John Hersey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988)