Category: Civil War (page 3 of 8)

November 4, 2011

Waiting for Hell on Wheels: AMC’s new drama on 1865 and the building of the transcontinental

I have to admit that I have been eagerly anticipating Sunday night’s premier of AMC’s “Hell on Wheels.” What could be better than the unheralded Anson Mount, one of the best Southern actors of our day, playing an ex-Confederate guerrilla looking for his wife’s killer after the Civil War in Nebraska, in and around the building of the Union Pacific Railroad and its rolling town of “Hell on Wheels”?

Nearly ten years ago, Mount played an FBI undercover operator in ABC’s short-lived Line of Fire. That show was set in Richmond, Virginia, and featured a mix of Southern characters much as Justified has done recently. Mount was simply excellent in Line of Fire, and so were the others (especially Leslie Hope), but the slow pace of the show and perhaps its Southernness did not connect with the audience. The Wire was able to capture for Baltimore much more of that city’s quirky and tough street life than Line of Fire could Richmond’s.

Hell on Wheels has already generated some controversy over what exactly the scene of the building of the Union Pacific might have been like and over the plausibility of the show’s mix of Union and Confederate veterans, freed slaves, Native Americans, immigrants, company executives, and town boosters. The Los Angeles Times reviewed Hell on Wheels and mistakenly referred to Colm Meaney’s character as Thomas “Doc” Duncan–it was Thomas C. “Doc” Durant. The picture of so many freedmen in the scene has prompted questions.

One controversy has erupted over whether Chinese laborers worked on the Union Pacific. The answer is no, at least not according to the Union Pacific records. Jeff Yang’s Wall Street Journal piece, “Do Chinese Pioneers Get Railroaded in AMC’s ‘Hell on Wheels’?”, examines the problem of what one commenter called “Asian invisibility.” I have found no records of Chinese laborers on in the Union Pacific payrolls in the 1865-68 period. The U.S. Census, while not the most reliable in counting some populations, recorded no persons of Chinese birth in Nebraska in 1870, nor any Chinese persons living along the counties of the Union Pacific Railroad. Yet, the U.S. Census counted even small populations of individuals, listing sixteen Chinese in Mississippi, two in Michigan, and seven in Colorado Territory that year. In 1870 the census listed 49,310 Chinese persons in California.

On the other hand, there is evidence of freedmen working on the Union Pacific as early as 1863. The U.S. Secretary of the Interior, John P. Usher, reported that year that 300 “free colored laborers” had moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, to begin working on the Union Pacific Railroad. His office had been “repeatedly urged to use its influence to cause as many colored laborers as can be procured to be employed on this work.” (see John P. Usher, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1863, p. xix, in Annual Report of the Department of the Interior)

AMC’s promotional material includes photos from the premier, and we see the black freedmen prominently in them. It would help if we could gain a renewed sense of the vast displacement and movement that came from the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Freedmen moved all over and even out of the South. Historian Leslie A. Schwalm has described the movement of freedmen into the Midwest during the war in detail (see Schwalm’s Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest). It should be no surprise that racial conflict simmered just below the surface and broke into the open at Memphis and other places, including in the North. One white former Confederate’s railroad trip in 1865, and his persistent racially bigoted views, can be found in Stephen Ash, A Year in the South: : 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People Who Lived Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History (New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins, 2004). Ash traces the story of John Robertson out of Tennessee in 1865 on his way to Chicago and then to Iowa, who finds freedmen in the depots at Nashville and Louisville and stewed that they “had forgot to get out of the way of white people.” Robertson’s annoyance at the changes all around him were further confirmed by his racial prejudices.

Whatever AMC does with this series, the Confederate gunslinging guerrilla played by Anson Mount should prove complicated. Given the recent scholarship on guerrilla warfare in the Civil War–which places the guerrilla action more at the center of the conflict and at the center of the Confederate national commitment–we might expect Mount’s character to carry the resentments and repressed loyalties of his lost cause forward. T. J. Stiles’s biography of Jesse James, for example, indicates how much of the Confederate national project came out of Missouri and continued to burn in the hearts of these men. Mark Geiger’s terrific book on Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War shows just how the motivations of Confederate guerrillas worked. Whether AMC will deal with the complex motivations and histories of race, white supremacy, and Confederate nationalism remains unclear. We will have to watch to find out!

In the meantime our Railroads and the Making of Modern America project includes some useful documents to put some of the AMC’s Hell on Wheels premier in perspective:

November 3, 2011

Miami University Lecture on Railroads and the Civil War

This Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecture and question and answer session was a blast. The audience and the board of the Colligan History Project could not have been more enthusiastic and knowledgeable. I thoroughly enjoyed the visit to Miami University Hamilton and was pleased to be part of a series on the Civil War, including David S. Reynolds (Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America) and Merritt Roe Smith (upcoming).

Miami University Michael J. Colligan Lecture Series, October 18, 2011.

October 27, 2011

Page 99 Test of The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War and the Making of Modern America

The Page 99 Test site has posted a piece about my page 99 test of The Iron Way. Marshal Zeringue runs the Page 99 Test blog and asked me about this a few weeks ago when the book came out. He also runs the Campaign for the American Reader.

October 8, 2011

Eric Foner on Lincoln and American Slavery: 16th Governor’s Lecture in the Humanities

On Wednesday evening, October 5th, over 400 patrons of the humanities gathered at the Joslyn Museum of Art in Omaha, Nebraska, for the 16th Annual Governor’s Lecture in the Humanities fundraiser. Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, gave this year’s lecture. The lecture was fantastic. Foner is one of the leading historians of 19th century America, and his book won the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln prizes. His other works (Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution) stand as some of the most influential and widely-cited books in American history.

The evening was a smash hit for the humanities. As a fundraiser for the Nebraska Humanities Council, the event exceeded its ambitious dollar goals and broke previous fundraising records. President of the University of Nebraska J. B. Milliken warmly welcomed guests and opened the evening’s program. Governor Dave Heineman introduced the speaker.

Eric Foner opened his lecture with a recent inquiry he received from a film producer asking if it were plausible to include a scene with Lincoln–pause for effect–playing the harmonica. Then there is always Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This set the tone for the evening: humor was allowed, sharp and interesting discussion would be celebrated, and serious questions about our past and the human condition would be undertaken. I had the opportunity to moderate the question and answer period after the lecture.

Several highlights from the lecture stand out to me days later. One was Eric Foner’s insistence on addressing the problem of “American” slavery. He drove home the point that much of the North was deeply complicit in the institution of slavery, that cotton’s wealth permeated, indeed underpinned, the Northern economy, and that New York City, in particular, benefitted so directly from slavery that it could hardly conceive of interfering with the institution. The breadth and reach of slavery is often missed or forgotten. Foner’s point, that slavery cannot be understood as geographically restricted to the South, has broad implications for how the American public today understands the coming of the Civil War.

At a student event earlier in the day, Eric indicated why the war was not caused by tariffs or economic policy (a common perception still) but instead caused by the problem of American slavery. The idea behind the tariff argument suggests that Lincoln was a representative of the bourgeoisie class in a battle with the South’s agrarian class, but this makes little sense. “600,000 Americans, I assure you, did not kill each other over the tariff,” Foner quipped. Both the North and the South were largely agrarian societies and both political parties and regions had bourgeois elements. The idea persists, but Foner directs our gaze to “American” slavery broadly construed, and the causes of the Civil War come into clearer focus.

A second highlight was Foner’s insistence on tracing Lincoln’s views on race and slavery to reliable sources. After Lincoln’s death, Foner points out, a whole host of recollections came forward claiming that Lincoln said this or that–that he was always against slavery, that he was born with a pen in hand to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The historian needs to evaluate each of these with great care. Direct quotes attributed to Lincoln twenty, thirty, or fifty years after the fact are common. Piecing together Lincoln’s earliest views on slavery requires detailed assessment of the source–who reported it, when, and for what audiences. History depends on evidence and on assessing the evidence rigorously and carefully; we cannot just say what we want about the past. So, the art of history, Foner tells us, is to write from the evidence and, at the same time, to interpret it faithfully and reasonably.

A final question of the evening asked Eric Foner to explain what we can learn from Lincoln’s political development, from his capacity to grow. Here, Foner’s study of Lincoln holds up the importance of understanding as clearly as we can how politics, the human experience, and history broadly are intertwined. Lincoln, he said, had principles and convictions–most prominently against the institution of slavery–but he negotiated these in everyday encounters as he met with people, listened to them carefully, and reconsidered his positions. Intellectually curious and attuned to the subtle changes in public opinion, Lincoln’s capacity to grow came, Foner tells us, from his willingness to take seriously the views of his opponents, to adjust to and shape public opinion, and yet to hold fast to principles. Foner shows us in detail how politics operates in a democratic society, how an especially astute political leader changes over time and in relation to events and people around him or her. It is an inspiring and humbling lesson.

The Nebraska Humanities Council lecture turned into a major celebration this year, affirming just how many people value and support the humanities. And showing how much history and the humanities have to teach us today.

June 17, 2011

Multi-Dimensional History: Digging into Data NEH presentation, June 9, 2011

Railroads and the Making of Modern America: Tools for Spatio-Temporal Visualization
Report to the National Endowment for the Humanities
Digging into Data Challenge
June 9, 2011

[note: Richard G. Healey, University of Portsmouth, began our presentation with a discussion of the overall goals of the project and the GIS effort; Ian Cottingham, University of Nebraska, followed with a detailed description of the Aurora Engine and our “Apps” being developed in our software framework for integrating and visualizing large-scale data. This talk was shortened considerably at the NEH in the interest of time but presented here in full.]

From our Richmond Daily Dispatch “App”, I think you can see that we are interested in using spatial visualization to allow deeper research, to make connections by seeing historical processes unfold at various scales. This tool, we hope, helps us read newspapers differently–with spatio-temporal context in the foreground.

I want to point out that in the four years of the Dispatch (100,000 articles, 24 million words) we found 8,300 unique place names, and these places were mentioned in 292,000 occurrences.

When we combine rich and accurate geocoding with sentence-level keyword searching, we are able to look at occurrences in a different, perhaps more revealing way. We can find, for example, a pattern in newspaper mentions of “contraband” places that we may not have fully seen or considered, especially when mapped over time in the Civil War. There were numerous references to what were called “contrabandville”s. And we can begin to map their locations, which ones were near railroads. We can we trace African American names of railroad workers, extract those and relate them to other data in our system, including payroll records and census records.

Now, 10 years ago, before setting out on my “railroad journey,” I wrote with youthful enthusiasm the following optimistic assessment of where I was going with the Aurora project:

“We have what earlier generations of social science historians could not imagine: a high speed and widely accessible network linked to cheap and powerful computers running common software with well-established standards for the handling of numbers, texts, and images. Now we need to design the portals into that network that let people collaborate in a disciplined, cumulative, and verifiable way. . . . The data exists all over the country in easily accessible form.”

I admit that this was a rather breezy assessment of the state-of-the-field in digital humanities.

The data in fact exists all over the country, but it is not in an easily accessible form.

We do, however, have tools now that earlier social scientists would envy. On a recent trip to the Newberry Library, I saw an entry in the Burlington Railroad finding aid: for a CDROM of all employees blacklisted between 1877 and 1892. This was the work of Paul Black, an economic historian at University of California, Long Beach, who studied railroad workers back in the 1970s. The CD contained a pdf of the computer ascii print out of Black’s data set in QLISTFORMAT–in fields by last name, occupation, place, date, and reason or cause for dismissal, as well as whether they were reinstated. This is a 200 MB file with over 8,000 railroad workers listed.

Black could do a great deal with this database, and he was at the time one of the leading quantitative historians. He could sort it by place or location and use location as a variable.

But there was much that he could not do, could not discover. He could not spatially relate his data–to the census data you just saw, to the Freedmen’s Bureau data we’ve assembled, to other railroad occupational data, to county-level political data. And he could not easily visualize these data and their spatial relationships.

Black largely worked on this alone and published a single, very useful scholarly journal article from it.

But the model for this scholarship has changed. We do need to “collaborate in a disciplined, cumulative, and verifiable way.” This is one of the main goals of our project, it turned out, and to me it’s lasting importance.

Our team partners at Stanford’s Spatial History Lab (Richard White, Kathy Harris, and Erik Steiner) have been working with us to use Black’s list and produce visualization models. They were able to bring in the As and Bs (over 400 records) as a sample. Here are several of the tableau visualizations of this data produced at Stanford in collaboration with us:

C.B.&Q. Railroad Discharges by Top Ten Occupations:
C.B.&Q. Railroad Discharges by Year by Occupation:
C.B.&Q. Railroad Discharges by Month by Occupation:
C.B.&Q. Railroad Discharges Trend Line by Occupation:

At this point I would like to thank Ian Cottingham, our software architect, but also Leslie Working, our project manager, and the undergraduate students who have worked on this project, Miles, Luci, and Brian.

This is the most exciting prospect of the project for us: changing the pattern of humanistic work to enable focused scholarly teams to improve the quality and usability of large-scale data. Students for example in a Civil War course would learn much more about the war, its geography, social experience, and political conflicts by mapping and encoding places and semantic concepts in newspapers, using our Aurora framework, than by more traditional means. And the coding they do can then can be gradually machine assisted to work on larger data sets.

It seems to us that this model is the way forward. We want to mobilize an intensive expert base necessary to prepare, analyze, and visualize data, a tool set necessary to work within and among these data, and a scholarly community necessary to scale-up wider applications for the data.

If we are to make our digital work “cumulative and verifiable,” we face a social question: how do we allow, reward, encourage, and review historians who work in teams? The large scale data in the Digging into Data challenge requires us to work in larger scholarly networks of experts and colleagues. This in itself will require substantial change in behavior, in patterns of scholarly work, in promotion and tenure. We can imagine that the future of digital history and digital humanities will look something like the work of physicists in the Large Haldron Collider in which thousands of investigators work together and write papers.

Indeed, we might think of large-scale data visualization for history as something like a particle in an accelerator: we cannot see the particles themselves, but we can see the patterns they make in a medium. In the spatial medium, the latent becomes manifest, invisible becomes visible. As Marc Bloch wrote, time is ‘the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible.'”

By working together, by bringing expertise together, we discovered patterns once not visible but suddenly apparent: the widespread absence and geographic distribution of African American railroad workers in the North and, conversely, the extent, depth, and geographic distribution of African American railroad workers in the South. We now have an occupational and geographic profile of black railroad workers that we did not have before. And we are producing journal articles now with five authors–not quite the thousands in the LHC project, but many more than usual in the humanities.

Other patterns too came forward as new areas to investigate. African American post emancipation mobility and its relationship to the railroads and rail employment appeared surprisingly disconnected. We found almost no railroad labor contracts in the Freedmen’s Bureau series for important rail centers, such as Petersburg, Virginia, Memphis, Tennessee, Alexandria, Virginia, and Louisville, Kentucky. Perhaps, black railroad workers stayed with their companies through emancipation. Perhaps, the jobs were contracted through other more local means, such as word of mouth, family relationships, or patronage. This raises important questions about the transition from slavery into emancipation and the process in industry and urban settings.

In 1861 Charles Joseph Minard developed a path-breaking graph of the Napoleonic War which combined weather, casualties, terrain, and time. His representation of the attrition on Napoleon’s army has become an iconic classic in the art of visual complexity. The graph related the different data in an elegant visual narrative of such power that it has influenced scholars ever since–from historians to computer scientists. The leading scholar of visual information, Edward R. Tufte, considered it possibly “the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” Yet, Minard drew his first such graphs for railroads in France and developed his technique in works combining traffic and distances. In 1845 he published what he called his first “figurative map” (“cartes figuratives”) describing the effects of the railway between Dijon and Mulhouse in France. “It is by sight alone,” Minard explained in 1861, “that this map, which was found to be eloquent, made visible the relationship between the numbers of travelers, because it will be noticed that it does not carry a single numeral.”

Minard’s work, however much the product of his genius, was also part of the modern railway culture. The railroad inaugurated fresh approaches to visual information. One should be able to “glance at a map” and extrapolate quickly the time, distance, and world one might encounter. Minard, more than perhaps anyone of his generation, experimented with the forms for conveying multiple sources of information. The practices that railroads and telegraphs helped shape in the United States (and Europe) continued long after the Civil War, and so did the incongruities they also generated. Railroads especially affected conceptions of time and personal mobility, boosted confidence in empirical and statistical information, and reinforced ideas about the ways modern societies controlled nature. They created and sustained increasingly complex interfaces–atlases, bridges, tunnels, and timetables to name a few. Using digital sources and techniques, we have assembled some lost histories of these data in nineteenth-century American society.

All of this is to say that until quite recently historians had no or limited means of spatial discovery, only illustration. We are on the cusp of not only new discoveries, maps of our history never created before, and we are on the cusp of a new shape to our scholarly practice.

Notes: Charles Joseph Minard, Des Tableaux Graphiques et des Cartes Figuratives (Paris, 1862) translated by Dawn Finley. < http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard-maps>. Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, Ct.: Graphics Press, 1983): 40-45. About Minard’s Napoleonic War map, Tufte points out that “viewers are hardly aware that they are looking into a world of four or five dimensions.” Also Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (Cheshire, Ct.: Graphics Press, 1997).