History 338 - Civil War and Reconstruction

Birth of a Nation Essay

2011-05-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

There are almost an endless number of directions in which you might turn in order to write your Birth of a Nation essay, but let me help you with this overarching theme:

Made in 1915, the film depicts the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction exactly 50 years after Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox. Today, we are amidst the Sesquicentennial and the memory of the war's meaning has returned to the public discourse with a vengeance.

In writing your essay, feel free to consider all of the works that I have assigned in this class as material for analyzing this film. You might also consider reading a few articles from the New York Times's Disunion column, which features many articles that try to articulate what the Civil War means today.

Your essay should consider how the core memories of the Civil War and Reconstruction created by Birth of a Nation compare with newer narratives of the Civil War Era written over the last 100 years (as exemplified by our readings) and how the issues engaged by Birth of a Nation continue to define the question of nation, race, and war memory.

I will also allow your paper to be 2000 words in length if needed. Yet I encourage you to be concise. Length, as evidenced by your last set of essays, does not necessarily equate content!

The 1890s: The Last Chapter of Reconstruction?

2011-04-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

Fred Ogden's resting place in Metairie Cemetery

The Combine Against the Democracy (Daily States, 1892)

Today we are going to look at the period of what I like to call "Reconstruction after 1877." The Conservative and Democratic parties may have taken control of every southern state by 1877, but this neither created amity among white men, nor did it really end many of the causes of Reconstruction's turmoil.

But in the 1890s, in every southern state, we see a renewed fight for dominance over state politics. Every state has a little bit different set of issues. But in each state, one side will pursue a strident devotion to white supremacy as the means to defeating its rival. This use of white supremacy in the politics of the 1890s is in many ways more responsible for segregation and disfranchisement than the fall of federal Reconstruction policy in 1877. Consider also that the peak of lynching occurred between 1890 and 1915.

Birth of a Nation came out in 1915 against this backdrop. It was a nostalgic image of the past, but it was also a very carefully crafted propaganda piece for not only white supremacy, but the struggles of the victorious factions in the South. We are going to be thinking about how much the film is actually a projection of the struggles of the 1890s onto the memory of Reconstruction.

Below we have some of the pairings of generational nemeses.

In South Carolina:

"Pitchfork" Ben Tillman (b. 1847)

Wade Hampton III (b. 1818)

In Louisiana:


Murphy J. Foster (b. 1849)

Francis T. Nicholls (b. 1834)

Legacies of Reconstruction

2011-04-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

There are two basic ideas that I would like to discuss today:

One of these has to do with the movement toward Redemption, our reading, and the generation of white southerners who come to the fore in the years leading up to 1877.

The next has to do with measuring the enormous accomplishments of black Reconstruction. There is a narrative of failure tied to Reconstruction as it relates to the establishment of black rights. But I would argue that, in fact, black southerners accomplish quite a lot up to 1877 and continue to build upon those gains (not without reversals) all the way through the imposition of Jim Crow and economic reversals that suffocate such progress.

Engaging this third idea will help us discuss further the narrative of chapters 8 and 9, which look at Reconstruction's legacies after 1877.

The acrimony among Redeeemers in Louisiana after 1877 will have its parallel in other states. This divide will have an influence on the way we should look at Birth of a Nation.

The Tug-of-War of Reconstruction

2011-04-07T12:45:00.000-07:00

Today we are going to look at Reconstruction-era violence, Republican factionalism, and the emergence of the Redeemers.

Horace Greeley, who ran for President against Grant in 1872

An excellent map. Let's look at this and consider readmission dates and what this means vis a vis the nature of Reconstruction violence and the varying nature of the Redemption struggle.

At the Heart of the Matter

2011-04-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

If we are going to be prepared to analyze Birth of a Nation when we come back from Spring Break, we have to understand what the narrative of Reconstruction means in broader national context. Today we'll look at this big picture along with the specifics that go along with this theme.

Presidential Reconstruction and the Radical Ascendancy

2011-03-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

Here is a good overview of Reconstruction in Louisiana. Whoever wrote this must be a genius!
Here is another one about Georgia, which is also very informative.

President Andrew Johnson

Today we are going to be talking about a wide range of concepts about the politics of Reconstruction - particularly the bigger issues of "why?" We will concentrate on five themes of interpretation: Material, Political, Moral, Ideological, and Sectional

The Road to Appomattox

2011-03-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

Union Soldiers at Petersburg - compares favorably with scenes in Cold Mountain

The Crater

The Spencer Repeating Rifle

Sherman's march through the Carolinas from Joe's SC Railroads Research Page which is a pretty cool site done by a history and rail enthusiast in South Carolina.

The Line of Lee's Retreat

The McClean House where Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant. (At least a re-creation / restoration) Near Appomattox Courthouse, VA.

Ford's Theater at the time of Lincoln's assassination on April 14.

Capture of Jefferson Davis

Cold Mountain Essay

2011-03-28T06:52:00.000-07:00

All,

The guidelines for the Cold Mountain essay are essentially the same as they were for Ride With the Devil except in that you are clearly going to be pairing this film extensively with Escott's After Secession, and to a much lesser degree (because it did not focus on desertion) For Cause and Comrades. I think the book and the film offer many avenues for comparison so please think about those opportunities fully. Certainly life on the home front looms large as does the entire "collapse of the Confederacy" theme. Speaking of which, I'll be lecturing on the Confederacy's collapse on Tuesday.

The due date for this essay is Thursday, and I expect that you will bring a PRINTED double-spaced copy of your essay to class.

best,

JN

Cold Mountain this week

2011-03-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

All,

This is a reminder that we will be watching Cold Mountain in class. As a consequence, you will need your laptop computer. If last time was any indication of future problems, please be certain to charge up your computer's battery before coming to class if at all possible. There are only so many outlets!

Also note that I have made the due date for the essay on the following Thursday, just as I did last time. This is reflected in red on the syllabus link in the right hand margin of this blog.

best,

JN

Holding Together (Barely) on the Southern Homefront

2011-03-17T11:06:00.000-07:00

A few things we are going to look at today include once again the idea of Confederate Nationalism, particularly in the light of scholarship by Gary Gallagher as a foil to our reading by Escott. We will consider the role played by Davis in prolonging the war, particularly with regard to the period following the fall of Atlanta in September, 1864. Lastly, we will investigate the prospects of early peace, including the Hampton Roads Conference and what it might have meant for emancipation.

That Summer of '64

2011-03-15T11:30:00.000-07:00

We're going to look at military and political situation that faced the Union between January and September of 1864.

The Battle of the Wilderness

Spotsylvania Courthouse

A depiction of the "Bloody Angle" in the "Mule Shoe" at Spotsylvania Courthouse

Grant's "Overland Campaign" between The Wilderness and Petersburg including Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.

The Chattanooga Campaign

2011-03-14T04:55:00.001-07:00

This took a lot longer than either you or I could imagine. But it only takes 20 minutes to watch! Please give it a look before class on Tuesday.

Take Home Test (Content Quiz 6)

2011-03-02T09:56:00.000-08:00

There are two questions that I want you to answer for your take-home Content Quiz - this replacing your quiz that we would normally turn in on Thursday in class. You need to answer thoroughly, but concisely - in other words, don't write pages and pages. You should be ale to answer these questions (if they were hand-written) on one side of a standard piece of paper - much like in class.

Question 1:

How did the Union's policy toward civilians evolve during the war, legally, politically, and strategically?

Question 2:

Explore and explain the many oppositional views held by northerners with regard to the recruiting of black men as soldiers. Then explain the various reasons how individuals once opposed to black soldiers might be persuaded begrudgingly to accept them.

Be sure to turn in this Content Quiz with your Ride With the Devil essay.

General Orders No. 1: Our Plan for Thursday

2011-03-01T14:54:00.000-08:00

Due to the difficulty of having a class that meets late on Thursday afternoon, less than an hour before the beginning of Mardi Gras parades, we will not be meeting on Thursday, March 3. This affects the following matters:

1.) This is the due date for your film essay. In order to satisfy the due date for your essay, I will need to see a printed copy placed in my mailbox or under my office door when I check both locations on Thursday afternoon, around 4:00 PM. I will not accept emailed documents as on time. I want a printed essay to grade.

NOTE: I want your essays to be double-spaced. I cannot write comments on single-spaced papers. Your essay should be worth the death of a tree or two.

2.) We normally have our weekly test on Thursday. In its stead, I will place a take-home quiz on the blog that you will complete, print out, and turn in with your essay. I will post this take-home quiz to the blog sometime on Wednesday.

3.) I cannot give my lecture on Thursday. Instead I will make a video podcast of the lecture material that I had hoped to cover in class. Do not expect this on the blog until Thursday or perhaps even Friday. This material will not be part of the take-home quiz, but will be fair game for the next quiz that we take after Mardi Gras.

Have an enjoyable and safe Mardi Gras!

Essay questions for Ride With the Devil

2011-02-24T10:51:00.000-08:00

So far in our class, our readings and discussions have frequently encountered the issue of loyalty - broadly construed. For instance, you might consider "loyalty" in the terms of McPherson's For Cause and Comrades - to wit, what made men fight, and what kept them fighting for a cause. Thinking about the many reasons offered in McPherson's work, you might compare it with the fictional story of Jake Roedell and Jack Bull Chiles, their relationship, experiences, the people that they meet, the paths that they take. You could do the same with regard to the "causes" for which these fictional characters fought by considering Escott's Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism.

Your objective for the essay is less to demonstrate strong opinions about the movie than it is to place its characters in the context of the scholarship that we have encountered in class thus far. Pick out an intellectual thread (devotion to cause, honor vs. duty, sense of national identity, etc.) that you find in both the readings and the film and develop an essay that explores this theme fully by tracing it in the film and giving evidential basis from the texts.

You might write an essay, for instance, along the lines of "Exploring Conceptions of Honor in Civil War America through an Analysis of Ang Lee's Ride With the Devil." In short, you are making a historical analysis of a film that is (arguably) worthy of such attention.

Being thoughtful, perceptive, and sound in your scholarly basis are the key.

Writing style: I expect your best prose and I will edit for style. Avoid the dreaded passive voice construction. Have a clear thesis. Incorporate the best practices of historical writing. I expect Chicago / Turabian style footnote citations for your texts. I do not need a works cited page if you properly footnote. You do not need to footnote direct quotes from the film.

Length: This essay need not be lengthy. Try to limit your essay to 1200 words - or about 4 pages. Use your space wisely. Be concise.

The original due date for the essay was March 1. I am extending this date to March 3 so that you might have more time to ask me questions before turning in your finished product.

Chickamauga and Chattanooga

2011-02-17T08:56:00.000-08:00

A scene on the Chickamauga Battlefield

The Wikipedia page for Chickamauga actually has a pretty good series of maps that explain the battle.

Some of the Players we will engage include Bragg, Longstreet, Rosecrans, Thomas, and, eventually, Grant.

A basic battle map of the following battle of Chattanooga:

Map of Slavery Discovered at NOAA

2011-02-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting blog post that references the map below:

A Crucial Six Months: January to July, 1863

2011-02-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

Today we will look at a series of campaigns that constitute a major directional shift in the course of the war. As 1863 began, the Union's efforts seemed to be bogging down. Although the Army of the Potomac had successfully turned back Lee's planned invasion of Maryland at the battle of Antietam, the year ended dismally with the failure at Fredericksburg. In the West, where the Union had achieved far greater success with Grant, progress seemed to bog down as the campaign against Vicksburg momentarily stalled. The objective today will be to explore the events that led from this bleak winter for the Union to the euphoric victories of July 4, 1863.

The battles that we'll look at today are:

Stones River (Dec. 28-31, 1862) near the town of Murfreesboro, TN
The Vicksburg Campaign
Chancellorsville A good series for May 1 - May 4
Gettysburg (here is a good map of the campaign northward) Gettysburg Day 2 (Peach Orchard)Pickett's Charge

The Diverging Nations

2011-02-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

If there is a point underlying the narrative of Chapter 6 in Nelson & Sheriff, it is the fact that the Northern government used the war as an opportunity to plunge the nation headlong into modernity. Indeed, the financial and practical considerations of waging a war, combined with a sort of political unity centered on the Republican Party, enabled the North to recast the relationship between the states and the national government.

Battles: We are going to TRY to get through 1862 today. With luck.... with luck.

Here is an excellent animation of the Battle of Fredericksburg (December, 1862)

The first 18 months of war

2011-02-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

Old-fashioned military history has made a small comeback in the profession in recent years. No doubt this is in some measure due to our current military entanglements. But it is not nearly as prominent as it once was, particularly in the context of a collegiate-level Civil War class. Today, we ask a much wider range of interpretive questions about the Civil War Era than we did 50 years ago, when interest picked up during the war centennial in the 1960s. The design of this course reflects many, yet certainly not all, of this interpretive myriad. All the same, military history - the who, where, what, when - and more importantly - "why" of the battles remains important to any true understanding of the conflict. What happened on the battlefield had a symbiotic relationship with the broader changes taking place in America, having a direct impact upon their course.

Today (and likely into Wednesday and possibly next week) we will look at the first 18 months of the war. It is important to pay attention to chronology more than specific dates of battles. Yet dates also remain important. The sequence of events is key in war, because precise moments dictate subsequent outcomes. Therefore, I hope that you pay particular attention to the sequence of events and their significance during the lecture.

Explanations of battles will not get into the deeply detailed terrain of inside-baseball military history. But I will explain to you in broad strokes the key moments so you have a better understanding of how the observers and participants judged the results of the conflict.

To lend some structure to what for some will be an endless array of place and proper names and dates, I supply an overview of what we will cover:

The clashes of 1861: May to December: Virginia, Western Kentucky, and Missouri
The West in early '62: January to June: From Donelson to the fall of New Orleans and Memphis by way of Shiloh and the fall of Beauregard and the rise of Grant and Halleck
The East in early '62: April through July: The Peninsular Campaign and the Seven Days' Battles / The Valley Campaign. The rise of Lee and Jackson, the first fall of McClellan
The East in mid '62: August - Second Bull Run and the fall of Pope and recall of McClellan
The Confederate Offensive of '62: Late August through early October: Bragg and Kirby Smith in Kentucky, Lee in Maryland.
The West in late '62: June through December: Continued Confederate Failures: Baton Rouge, Iuka, Corinth. The fall of Van Dorn and Price and the rise of Sherman.
The Mess in the East, late '62: October through December: the last fall of McClellan, Rise and fall of Hooker and Fredericksburg.

Note the useful LINK to the MAP on the right hand margin of this blog!

The sunken road at Antietam as it appeared in 2007.

Antietam Creek.

G. T. Strong diary on NYT

2011-01-27T11:18:00.001-08:00

Today's post in the New York Times Disunion blog is particularly appropriate for our moment in the course.

The South on a War Footing

2011-01-27T10:04:00.000-08:00

I will want to spend a fair amount of time today discussing chapters 2 and 3 from the Escott book, but we will also spend some time considering the transformation of the South set into motion by the war.

One thing that I want us to consider today in our discussion is the role of contingency - in history in general, and in determining the root causes and objectives of the Civil War in particular. To wit, that while one thing may be absolutely true in January, it might not be in April. The mutability of the Civil War's main themes are one of the key sources of subsequent disagreement. Mutability is hard to chart. Everybody can be right if they are selective enough in their analysis. But we must chart mutability if we are to understand the war.

The roots of New South industrialization can be found in the policies of Jefferson Davis:

As I mentioned earlier, it was not as though the South was without industry before the Civil War, although the scale of it dramatically increased. The Roswell Mill in Roswell, Georgia is a good example of a factory that became much more important with the onset of war. (It was also a forerunner of the New South textile mill.)

The Roswell Mill located at rolling falls on the Chattahoochee River.

Likewise, the modest Tannehill Iron Works (just south of Birmingham, Alabama) of antebellum times underwent a massive transformation during the war. Birmingham, which did not exist at the time of the Civil War, would be founded on the iron industry that blossomed for the sake of the Confederate effort.

Similarly, North Georgia also had a nascent iron industry in Bartow and Cherokee Counties. The Cooper Furnace is representative of this period of time. The area did not develop into a major iron and steel producer, however, because the local ore deposits were not nearly as rich of those found in Alabama.

More sophisticated manufacturing took place in cities like New Orleans, where the Leeds Foundry (today owned by the Preservation Resource Center) fabricated everything from cannon to ironclad ships. The city's early loss to the Union Navy was a blunder of epic proportions from many standpoints, not the least of which was the supply of war materials.

Like other Southern industrial enterprises begun in the 1830s, the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia grew tremendously during the war. But few other factories were nearly as important.

Southern manufacturers had to be resourceful. Often times the weapons they produced contained material substitutions when possible - i.e., iron instead of steel, brass instead of iron. A good example of this can be found when comparing the Spiller and Burr revolver to the Starr Revolver picture below:

The Confederacy's need to manufacture the goods of war led it to engage in ambitious plans, including that of the national armory in Macon, Georgia. Considering the "non-industrial nature" of the South, it's construction, which began in 1863, was remarkable. It never fully realized its potential by the time of the war's end.

A photograph of the recently captured Macon Arsenal taken in June, 1865.

Yet in the end, southern manufacturing was a shabby replica of efforts in the North, where a major industrial complex began to flourish during the war.

Creating an Army from Scratch

2011-01-25T10:45:00.000-08:00

The following pictures should give you an idea of the war's ability to "make" and "unmake" people as well as institutions. The war represented a tremendous problem, but with this trouble came incredible opportunity. Many of the fundamental questions in American history for the rest of the 19th Century were in some way settled by the way fate intervened in lives of the Civil War generation in 1861-62.

Leading an army: A portrait of youth.

George Brinton McClellan - made General in Chief of the United States Army. Prior military training: extensive.
Age in 1861: 35

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - (future legendary Associate Justice of the Supreme Court) as a young lieutenant in the Union Army. Prior military training: none.
Age in 1861: 20 (just barely)

Ulysses S. Grant - Future commander of the Union Army and President. Prior military training: substantial.
Age in 1861: 39

John B. Gordon - Major General in the Confederate Army. Enlisted as Captain, promoted by 1862. Prior military training: none
Age in 1861: 29

Not everybody was young, including political generals (the early) bane of both armies:

Leonidas Polk, the "Fighting Bishop." Kin of James K. Polk, Friend of Jeff Davis, appointed to high command despite no military experience - Was a graduate of USMA 1827. Killed outside Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia in 1864 at age 58

It is not hard to believe that Nathaniel P. Banks might one day have been President had he been at least a competent and effective general, but he was not. This former Speaker of the House became a political general at age 45, at the beginning of the war:

Both North and South had to construct armies essentially from scratch.

What were some of the considerations that the leadership had to take into consideration?
There were certainly tangible issues such as how one might pay for the war. Then there is the question of just how long the war was going to be and to what degree you were ready to disrupt your society. How many men, for instance, should stay home to keep a nation's economy operating.

We read about how McClellan ordered Hardee's Tactics printed for his inexperienced officers, but there were a lot of factors to consider that weren't going to be solved with readily available (if out of date) books.

Not only did few men have military experience of any kind, though frontiersmen North and South and slave patrol personnel in the South had some useful skills in human combat. But what of supplying an army that was larger than anything anyone had ever seen before? Who knew how to feed 15,000 ... 20,000... 100,000 men in the field, keep them moving, etc.? This required a great deal of managerial skill, and this tended to favor the captains of business in the North - if only they occupied those positions.

Some approximate figures:

Size of the Armies: Union
Jan. 1, 1861 - present for duty: 14,663
Jan. 1, 1862 - present for duty: 527,204

Confederate Forces:

Jan. 1, 1862 - present for duty: approx. 260,000

Moreover, think about something like medicine. How many doctors will a nation need? The answer was going to become clear: far more than either nation possessed. And these doctors had limited notion of the causes of infection. No wonder so many soldiers died of causes such as "camp fever."

How many engineers and manufacturers would need to be dedicated to the war effort? And again, you see that the North has a comparably large advantage. Consider again the "mechanic's' republic" as demonstrated by the daguerreotypes in the first lecture.

In Escott, you will read about Jefferson Davis's plans to supply his nation's war effort, and how radical they were, particularly in light of the South's supposed "states' rights" ideology. In light of the North's war making ability, was there any other viable choice?

Yet all of this discussion of the tangible does not tell the whole story. The United States, the world's most technologically advanced nation in the 1960s, ultimately foundered and withdrew from its involvement in Vietnam.

How important (and how strong) was the Northern commitment to Union? Did this exist in separation from the issue of slavery? Was the North truly united and could it stay united. Moreover, what did the North have to accomplish in order to declare true victory?

Yale Freaks

2011-01-20T08:58:00.001-08:00

A pretty interesting post from the New York Times's column on the Civil War.

Tumbling Toward War

2011-01-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Gangs of New York and the Antebellum Urban North

The fight scene might be a little "over-Tarantinoed," but the look, feel, and intent of the scene is pretty well done. I'm dubious that you would have a "battle" of this size and scope. Yet Herbert Asbury also knew his stuff. He wrote a good work the underworld in our very own French
Quarter.

Virginia and Maryland as a case study:

Slavery and Secession.

Virginia Maryland

Population 1,596,318 687,049

Slave Population 490,865 (31%) 87,189 (12%)

Slaveholders 52,128 (4.7%) 13,783 (2.3%)**

** note that these figures are deceptively small because only heads of households were slaveholders.

While there are other factors that were afoot in the secession debates in Maryland vs. Virginia (proximity to Northern power, military maneuvers, and leadership) one can argue that slavery had an influence on the overall culture of the two states and the relative devotion to the system harbored by their respective leaders. Think again about the difference between a "slave society" and a "society with slaves."

There is a fundamental question about the beginning of the war, and that is at what point does war become inevitable. We'll spend some time looking at the secession crisis and the efforts of some to avert bloodshed.

Why would Lincoln wish to scuttle the Crittenden Compromise? What were some of the factors in his decision? Was it a good one. Oh, and by the way, John J. Crittenden was a really interesting guy and a true patriot.

The bombardment of Fort Sumter precipitated a sort of hysteria that accelerated the march toward war, whether it was the subsequent secession of Virginia or the rage militaire described by James McPherson that took root in communities, North and South, all over the divided nation.

Here is an interesting page with links to images of Fort Sumter AND a live webcam of Fort Sumter. There is another web page promising a "pan and zoom webcam" of Charleston harbor, which would be really awesome if it actually worked!

On the eve of war, the North clearly possessed important material and demographic advantages over the South, but one must remember that the definition of very different for the two opposing sides. It is important to keep these competing definitions in mind when considering big-picture strategies and outcomes.

The war that most Americans envisioned in May, 1861 was based on notions that had become obsolete. Even among those who appreciated the potential for the coming war's devastation would probably have had a hard time imagining just how fundamental the war would reorder American institutions like the way we as a nation fight a war. By the Christmas of 1861, Americans were only beginning to understand the magnitude of what was afoot.

Here is a map of important military milestones during the Civil War. I'll have added a permanent link to it in the margin of this blog.

View HIST338 Nystrom Civil War Battles and Important Places in a larger map

Your classmates!

2011-01-18T12:56:00.001-08:00

There is a password for this video, and you can find it on Blackboard.

Slavery and Antebellum America

2011-01-17T21:04:00.000-08:00

On one hand, you can look at the issue of slavery in antebellum America and conclude that it is a vast and complex issue whose resolution could have taken any number of routes other than a bloody civil war. Certainly chapter 1 of Escott's book suggests that America, despite radical extremes, contained a substantial amount of the "great middle." On the other, one can look at Bleeding Kansas, accept it as an accurate microcosm of slavery, particularly in the context of westward expansion, and conclude that war was inevitable.

Today we will look at this complex issue of slavery and national politics, and why it was such a difficult issue to diffuse. It is important to remember in all of this that aside from a relatively small group of Americans who were deeply committed to ending slavery because they believed it morally wrong, the vast majority of the nation saw the institution as a political metaphor for sectional control and the political fate of the slave's alter ego: the free white laboring man.

There are a variety of considerations when understanding the scope of antebellum slavery:
1) financial aspects - both as labor and as capitol (and its absence of a consumer base)
2) slavery's role in lending structure to southern society (and the difference between "slave societies" and "societies with slaves") and "herrenvolk democracy"
3) what some saw as the "slave power conspiracy" in national politics

Moreover, why not just free the slaves? We'll look at some of the contemporary debates surrounding this issue.

Then, of course, there are the antislavery movements. We'll consider some of these schemes:
American Colonization Society
Gradualism and apprenticeship
Free Soil vs. Abolitionism
Garrisonian Immediatism

We spent some time in the first lecture looking at the growing belief that "labor" was the equivalent of "land" in redefining the nature of republicanism in the antebellum North. We can contrast that sharply with the political ideologies of the antebellum South - particularly in heavily slaveholding regions.

Some themes we will consider:

The collapse of the Whig Party and why this was generally bad for sectional amity.
Slavery and the politics of westward expansion.
Political ambition versus patriotism
The collapse of the Democratic Party in 1860

There is also the matter of the caning of Charles Sumner, which came in retaliation for Sumner's reasonably outrageous "Crime Against Kansas" speech. Below is an editorial depiction of the event. Why is there no southern version of this image?

One recent work that does a pretty good job of describing the ways in which Americans in the Civil War Era were at turns both contrymen and bitter enemies is Stephen Berry's House of Abraham: Lincoln & the Todds, a Family Divided by War. Mary Todd Lincoln came from a very large family whose siblings chose many competing roles. Berry makes the Todd family into a metaphor for the American family's experience in the Civil War. I'll spend a little time talking about the book and the Todds, particularly as they dispersed in the Antebellum Era.

Mary Todd Lincoln in her youth

Here's a clever pop-up window slide show of the Lincoln home in Springfield by the NPS.

Antebellum America

2011-01-13T10:08:00.000-08:00

Maybe your perception is that life was slower in antebellum America, but nothing could be further from the truth. Everything was quite literally in flux.

Between 1840 and 1860, the United States underwent many transformations. The following are a few of the important ones:

Westward expansion and internal migration
Rapid technological advances
Immigration and population growth
Political change

Students of the Civil War rightly focus a great deal of attention on the antebellum period in order to ascertain the moment when "it all went wrong." Historians, of course, are operating from a standpoint of hindsight. Because we know that the Civil War eventually took place, we look for what historians call "causation." Yet we must also be careful not to ask leading historical questions. To wit, we must ask if such historical trends add up to being the cause of the war, or whether or not they might have portended alternative outcomes.

This first lecture will spend most of its time looking at factors other than slavery, racial attitudes, and politics, which we will examine in greater detail next week.

Growth and a divergent North and South

All of America grew during the last decade of the antebellum era, but it did not grow everywhere at the same pace. A common perception related to Civil War causation is that the slaveholding South was a backward place that was politically, culturally, socially, and economically out of step with the modern North, and to an extent this is true. In reality, we must acknowledge that it was actually the North that had become radically different in the first half of the nineteenth century. For sure, slavery had always been a point of division between the two regions, but the economic explosion that occurred in the North between 1840 and 1860 set it apart not only from the South, but the rest of the world. With the exception of England, in many ways the South was actually much more like Europe, both in economic growth and social structure.

Immigration and natural increase made antebellum America grow. It was more telling, however, in the North:

Urbanization and Antebellum America: Some Statistics

City         1850        Rank        1860        Rank

New Orleans       116,375       5     168,675            6
Charleston            42,985        15    40,522            22
Richmond            27,570        26        37,910        25
Wilmington, NC    7,264        99        9,552        100

St. Louis                77,860        8        160,773        8
Chicago                29,963        24        112,172      9
Cleveland             17,034        41        43,417        21
Indianapolis          8,091        87        18,611        48

States:              1850 (slave)                       1860 (slave)      RG=Rate of Growth

Illinois                851,470                  1,711,951   RG = 101%
Ohio                 1,980,329                    2,339,511    RG = 18%
Minnesota       6,077 172,023   RG= 2730%

Tennessee    763,258 (239,459)    834,082 (275,719) RG = 9% (15%)
Georgia    524,503 (381,682) 505,088 (462,198) RG = - 3.7% (21%)
Louisiana    272,953 (244,869)    376,276 (331,726) RG = 37.8% (35%)

While immigrants, overwhelmingly from Germany and Ireland, flooded into the North in great numbers, native-born Americans of all regions were also on the move, often seeking out new opportunities further west. This resulted in Americans of differing regions and values coming into direct contact with one another.

Technology:

Migration and technology are not at all unrelated. Steam, both on rivers and rails, played an important role in America's economic expansion in the antebellum era. If you could imagine riding on this contraption! In time rail became more significant because it integrated the economies of the North on an east-west basis, and led to greater economic isolation between North and South. Consider the following maps and the impact of transportation networks on the fate of the nation.

Map: Potential routes of the transcontinental railroad in 1850 (Library of Congress)
Map: The growth in rail lines between 1850 and 1860 (Allyn Bacon Longman)

Technology and urbanization went hand-in hand. So, too, did technology and culture, particularly when viewed on a human-scale basis. Small scale innovation relied upon countless "mechanics" who labored in their workshops. Remember, that the 1850s were a time generally before engineering became a profession. Many developments came about in an unscientific trial-and-error method. Such developments favored the culture of the shopkeeper in the North. Consider these daguerreotypes from the Library of Congress of shopkeepers at their professions:

A watchmaker at his bench.

A blacksmith in his shop. Note that he's more than a farrier, he has the tools of the practical engineer nearby. The photo, like the one of the watchmaker, is an expression of masculine pride.

Here merchants in antebellum Philadelphia pose in front of their shops.

In these pictures we see the development of a growing class outside of the agrarian tradition.

The rapid economic and technological transformation that took place in the North also transformed its culture in a way that made it diametrically opposed to prevailing institutions in the South. What it meant to be a free white man differed considerably in the two regions.

The culture of the Antebellum South: Patrons and Clients and Paternalism

"Leisure and Labor" by Francis Blackwell Mayer

Although it isn't necessarily a fair comparison to make between the work of Mayer and the daguerreotype of the northern blacksmith, there is something to it.

Deconstructing what it meant to be a southern man.

Social inequality was arguably a more prominent feature in the South than in the North. Elites of both regions might blanche at the "creeping democratization" that they had seen in America in the last thirty years, but with the free labor culture in the North, such democratization was able to more fully manifest itself in political ways. Much of this had to do with urban centers and the growing impersonality of financial institutions in the North. In the far more rural South, personal connections were essential to one's economic health - particularly with regard to that mother's milk of agriculture and commerce - credit.

To use a term associated with Ancient Rome, the social relationships between men operated in the South operated on a patron-client basis. This system of mutual obligations tied southern elites to the middling classes and was particularly useful in a rural social and economic milieu. I will spend a fair amount of time in class discussing the many manifestations of this system.

Paternalism and patriarchy, while hardly unknown in the North, were also essential to the societal, familial, and gendered relationships in the South.

Modernizing and the South

The South was also interested in modernizing, but had to approach technology and innovation in a way that was compatible with southern cultural values. Perceptions of the South as a strictly agricultural economy, while generally true, are misleading. Younger southerners in particular saw modernization as a way to allow the South to regain its leadership role. Yet others feared what technological innovation and the growth of manufacturing might mean to southern social structure - that it might force the South to become more like the North in ways that southern elites feared. The challenge, then, was to both modernize the South while preserving its cultural fabric.

A People at War

2011-01-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

All,

I've posted the first two chapters of A People at War to Blackboard so those of you awaiting your book orders' arrival will have something to read!

Webster, Seward, and the Slavery Question

2011-01-12T06:09:00.001-08:00

An interesting NYT post on Senatorial speeches: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/a-baptism-of-blood/

The Civil War in the New York Times

2011-01-11T19:47:00.001-08:00

I believe this is the page link that will take you to the New York Times feature on the Civil War Sesquicentennial in Facebook.

Link to Syllabus

2011-01-11T12:20:00.000-08:00

Here is a copy of our syllabus

You can find a PDF of New Orleans after the Civil War on Blackboard.