Civil War Memory

Why A Casino Is A Good Idea For Gettysburg

I haven’t said much concerning the controversy surrounding the proposed casino at Gettysburg or the general problem of battlefield preservation. My silence is not so much due to the fact that I have nothing to say, but more because I don’t know what to say. I am very uncomfortable with the way in which the battle lines have been drawn by both sides. Whenever I find it difficult to get my bearings on a subject my first instinct is to ask about its history if it has one. It is surprising that not more has been written on the history of the preservation movement as it relates specifically to Civil War battlefields. It would be helpful to know how we got to this point.

The late Jim Weeks examines the marketing of the Gettysburg within days following the battle. This is important because it suggests that the current debate between the polar positions of preservation v. economic development is overly simplistic. Is a casino really inappropriate in Gettysburg given its history as a tourist destination? Consider Weeks on Gettysburg:

“Gettysburg has been part of a cultural marketplace ever since the shooting stopped, and its memory has spread with the growth of consumer culture. In other words, the cultural context in which Gettysburg earned its niche as a national icon and sustains that status has been neglected. Seen from a larger cultural perspective, Gettysburg takes on new significance—not just as a site of a pivotal Civil War battle, but as a shrine shaped by an evolving consumer culture. Its story sheds light on the nature of modern pilgrimage, including trends in leisure activities, commemoration, public behavior, mass culture, and merchandizing of the past.” (p. 6)

Gettysburg was never a purely sacred site cut off from the broader market forces. As I understand Weeks, the very idea of Gettysburg is wrapped up in these broader economic as well as other secular trends and values. A casino may create traffic congestion and other practical problems, but perhaps it compliments the landscape more than we would like to admit.

I believe that the preservationists are ultimately on the losing end of the stick. Please understand that I say this as someone who enjoys walking the fields and using them for teaching purposes. This is not to say that we should sit back and do nothing, just that a solution will have to be found within a broader culture that simply does not share the preservationist’s agenda. This is a nation that has little patience for its past and would much rather walk through another GAP than through the Devil’s Den. Ultimately we must acknowledge that the genie was let out of the bottle long ago.

I am learning through my own research on postwar commemorations of the Crater that the residents of Petersburg used the battlefield to attract people and businesses to the area at the turn of the 20th century. What is even more important to acknowledge is that many of the veterans of the battle, including Carter R. Bishop took the lead in marketing the battlefield for economic reasons. Bishop hoped to attract federal funds for the construction of a new military base that would bring both jobs and people to the Petersburg area. In doing so, he connected the practical benefits of locating the base in Petersburg with the necessity of preserving the areas battlefields: “If the military students of Europe think it worth while to come here to collect material for the text-books, is it not true wisdom on the part of the country to hand down intact to her soldiers . . . the most impressive volume on the Art of War?” His work culminated in the completion of Fort Lee in 1917 which is situated just up the road from the entrance to the Petersburg National Battlefield Park.

I respect people like Brian Pohanka and others for their passion and commitment to preservation. Brian’s battle cry of saving the battlefields for that one kid who picks up a book and wants to visit those places is admirable and reflects the depth of his conviction. At the same time I wonder whether his conviction as well as others really makes sense given the background of the landscape and the complex relationship between history, entertainment, and preservation.

Dear Carol Bundy: What Was Left Out

Dimitri seems unimpressed with the recent biography of Charles Russell Lowell by Carol Bundy. I am about half-way through the book and although I was going to wait until I finished it now seems to be an opportune moment to make a few points. I agree with Dimitri and other reviewers that a big problem with this book are the factual errors. No surprise that Dimitri honed in on the errors related to McClellan. Other mistakes include the reference to Mobile, Alabama as the site where the Confederate Constitution was written, and no doubt the military historians out there didn't fail to notice Bundy's inability to distinguish between a company and regiment. That said, I don't think it is fair to judge this study entirely by the factual mistakes unless they sufficiently hamper the broader interpretive points that are being made. (Note to Dimitri: There is more here than simply a relationship with George McClellan.) In this case much can be salvaged that is worth considering. First, Bundy's objective is not to write a detailed military history of another Civil War colonel. She is focused more on how Lowell's social, political, and economic background shaped his view of the war and what he came to believe it was about. The first few chapters do a wonderful job of capturing the conflict in the Lowell house between on the one hand a family steeped in tradition and reputation and the consequences of a failed business deal by Lowell's father. Lowell's mother emerges as an important intellectual influence on her son during the time she operated a school out of their home to make ends meet. The author does an excellent job connecting the younger Lowell to the elite circles of Boston's high society and the influences of the transcendentalists and a Harvard education. The reader learns a great deal about Boston society and a generation of young men who came of age just as the political debates over slavery in the 1850's were heating up. Though Lowell did not serve with the unit, this biography is a nice compliment to Richard Miller's recent study of the "Harvard Regiment." Again, I agree that the factual errors contained in this book are troubling. Bundy and/or the editor should have sent the manuscript to someone qualified who could have pointed them out; a quick glance in the acknowledgments section suggests that this did not happen. What is most impressive, however, is that this is her first attempt at writing history. All in all not bad. Given that the author is descended from Lowell one might have expected a less serious and more heroic tale. Instead the author really does make an effort to better understand Lowell and his close-knit community.

A Classroom Surprise

My AP classes are now reading about the Progressive Era. The period from roughly 1880 to 1914 is one of those quagmires that I never feel completely comfortable teaching. It’s become much easier over the last two years, but I still don’t have the confidence that I feel when I am teaching the colonial and antebellum periods or more recent trends. One of the areas that I stressed this year was the New Feminist movement of the early 20th century. I did this for a couple reasons, most importantly owing to the fact that the majority of my students are girls and next year I will be offering an elective on 20th century women’s history. Of course I know next to nothing about this subject, but I wanted to force myself to learn a new area and offer a course that the more high powered female students might be interested in taking. Last week we read primary sources by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on women at work and Margaret Sanger on birth control. We had some very interesting and intense discussions especially about Sanger’s economic argument for birth control.

Noticing that the girls in the class were really getting into the discussion I announced that my women’s history course will be offered next year as an elective. The response was dumfounding. At least half the girls in the class expressed a visceral displeasure at the prospect of having to take an entire course on women. I tried to steer the discussion in a way that would get at some rational explanation, but there was no one willing to share. The next day I asked again suspecting that some of the students might be a bit more relaxed. One of the students was kind enough to share her thoughts and what she said gives me reason to think that I will have my hands filled next year. Speaking only for herself she stated that many of the women that she perceived as falling within the domain of women’s history strike her as unfeminine and therefore unattractive to study. She acknowledged that many of the freedoms that she enjoys were the result of the sacrifice by women that came before her, but this still did not provide a sufficient reason for engaging in serious study. Of course there were plenty of girls in the class that were excited at the prospect of taking an elective on women’s history, but I was still surprised by the number of girls that expressed such a deep animosity to the idea.

I am looking forward to teaching an entire course on gender and exploring the ways in which politics, economics, and culture have shaped the course of women’s lives. Not knowing much about a particular subject is both refreshing and intimidating, but it is what makes teaching such an adventure. I have the luxury of being able to shape not only the intellectual lives of my students, but also my own.

A Little Civil War Insanity

A Little Civil War Insanity on a Sunday Thanks again to Mike's Civil War Musings for providing additional fodder for consideration. Ron Maxwell breaks new ground in better understanding our Civil War with his film "Horses of Gettysburg." From the press release: "The film celebrates the honor and courage of the 72,000 horses and mules that fought in the battle. Bussler says, 'It appeals to anyone who is passionate about horses or wants to learn more about the Civil War and American History.'" I'm not sure what to make of it except to say that it is the clearest example of anthropomorphism that I've ever come across. How about a counterfactual involving the horses that leads to a Confederate victory?

Interview with Ron Maxwell: Over

Interview with Ron Maxwell: Over at Mike's Civil War Musings there is an excerpt from a recent interview with the director of Gettysburg and Gods and Generals. In response to a question on what motivated him to make his Civil War movies, Maxwell had this to say:

"Well, let's say this, I was predisposed to the subject matter because from the time I was a rambunctious tyke, my father would take me to historical sites. I grew up in northern New Jersey. Then, I read and studied American History, perhaps with a little more avidity than many of my classmates. By the time I read "Killer Angels" in 1978, I was grounded and prepared, so that even before I finished reading it I felt a strong calling to make it into a motion picture."

Someone please explain to me how reading "Killer Angels" makes you "prepared" to do anything related to telling a story of the Civil War. We can only hope that Maxwell fails to find financial backing for the last installment of this trilogy. It is revealing, however, that the content of his movies reflects his familiarity with the history. Make no mistake about it, the disappointing box office returns for Gods and Generals had nothing to do with the level of interest in the Civil War, but with the overall quality of the movie.

A Good Read: Historian John

A Good Read: Historian John Hennessy on Fredericksburg's slave population and Emancipation

An excerpt from John Hope

An excerpt from John Hope Franklin's, Mirror to America: Towards the beginning of the memoir Franklin sets the tone with a paragraph that encapsulates a life lived in a racist society.

"This climate touched me at every stage of my life. I was forcibly removed from a train at the age of six for having accidentally taken a seat in the "white people's coach." I was the unhappy victim, also at age six, of a race riot that kept the family divided for more than four years. I endured the very strict segregation laws and practices in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was rejected as a guide through busy downtown Tulsa traffic by a blind white woman when she discovered that the twelve-year old at her side was black. I underwent the harrowing experience as a sixteen-year old college freshman of being denounced in the most insulting terms for having the temerity to suggest to a white ticket seller a convenient way to make change. More harrowing yet was the crowd of rural white men who confronted and then nominated me as a possible Mississippi lynching victim when I was nineteen. I was refused service while on a date as a Harvard University graduate student at age twenty-one. Racism in the navy turned my effort to volunteer during World War II into a demeaning embarassment, such that at a time when the United States was ostensibly fighting for the Four Freedoms I struggled to evade the draft. I was called a "Harvard nigger" at age forty. At age forty-five, because of race, New York banks denied me a loan to purchase a home. At age sixty I was ordered to serve as a porter for a white person in a New York hotel, at age eighty to hang up a white guest's coat at a Washington club where I was not an employee but a member." (p. 4)

Franklin will be in Charlottesville next month for the Virginia Festival of the Book. I look forward to hearing him and having my book signed.

A Really Good Gettysburg Book

I've commented on a number of occasions on just how much I like Margaret Creighton's recent study, The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History. There is an excellent review of the book in the most recent issue of the American Historical Review (February 2006) by Barbara Cutter of the University of Northern Iowa. Here is a paragraph from that review which continues the recent string of posts on expanding the way we think about the military history of the Civil War.

"The idea that women, African Americans, and immigrants are central actors in American history is certainly not new, but what is important about this book is the long overdue application of this idea to Civil War military history. Although scholarship especially in the last ten years, has proliferated on women, immigrants, and African Americans in the Civil War, the history of the battles themselves has hardly changed; a few heroic women, perhaps a regiment of brave immigrants or African Americans has been added, but the story remains fundamentally the same. By taking diverse groups seriously, Creighton has altered and enlarged the story of Gettysburg. One might have wished she had gone even further and used her evidence to complicate some common understandings of gender, race, and ethnicity in the Civil War era. For example, the fact that so many of Gettysburg's white men were willing to leave female family members alone to face Confederate occupation suggests that gender relations between white men and women and gendered notions of power were far more complex in this period than scholars have generally suggested. Nonetheless, this well-researched and engaging book makes a key contribution to the field by integrating social history and military history in an intriguing new fashion." (p. 180-81)

I am going to follow this up hopefully over the weekend with a post on the "cult of manliness" and the Civil War. Stay tuned.

Edward L. Ayers on Lincoln

Edward L. Ayers on Lincoln and USCT's at Lehigh University:

“Lincoln understood that the war was a race to see which society fell apart first,” Ayers said. “He was determined that that was one race the North was not going to win.” It was the widespread disdain for Lincoln that allowed him to make some of the most controversial decisions of his presidency, Ayers said. He considered his re-election a lost cause and therefore felt free to make bold decisions and take daring actions despite being aware of the massive consequences of doing so. The boldest of these actions was the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Ayers said. Lincoln, with the stroke of a pen, ended more than 200 years of slavery and granted freedom to over 4 million southern slaves.

The war had begun as a war to preserve the Union, but the Emancipation Proclamation transformed it into a war to free an entire people who had been enslaved for more than two centuries. “Lincoln accomplished the greatest sleight of hand in American history,” Ayers said. Ayers also discussed the Northern population’s attitude toward slavery. The Northern understanding of freedom had to be built, Ayers said. They had to feel that freedom for the slaves was right.

Northern blacks did the most to change the minds of Northern whites. During the Civil War, over 200,000 black men volunteered for the Union Army. Their willingness to fight and die for their brothers held in bondage made a deep impression in the minds of the white population of the North, Ayers said. “Black soldiers changed the minds of Northerners by saving the Union,” Ayers said. Northern soldiers fighting in Southern states who saw the cruelty of slavery with their own eyes also changed their outlook, he said. “They witnessed firsthand a people yearning for freedom,” Ayers said.

Postscript: Check out Brian Dirck's thoughtful response over at A Lincoln Blog.

Another Look At Douglas Southall Freeman: Part 3

Read Part 1 & Part 2 Freeman’s portrayal of Lee and the ANV can be summarized as follows: (1) Lee and the ANV recovered from the defeat at Gettysburg and remained confident in its ability to counter Union offensives in the spring of 1864; (2) Though continued Union pressure around Petersburg, desertion, and Confederate losses in other areas affected Lee and the ANV physically and psychologically, both had reason to remain confident in the immediate future; (3) The ANV maintained a level of morale sufficient to keep it together in the days following its retreat from Petersburg, until enough Union pressure forced its surrender on April 9. A short survey of recent histories of Lee and the ANV during the final year of the war demonstrates that Freeman’s interpretation cannot simply be characterized as an extension of the Lost Cause paradigm, but anticipates important trends and assumptions that have shaped recent studies.

On the question of Confederate readiness in the spring of 1864, Peter Carmichael has written that Gettysburg represented a “passing storm, tumultuous in nature, but short in duration.” Back safely on Virginia ground, Lee’s men “felt rejuvenated.” Carmichael contends, “nothing had transpired in Pennsylvania to cause his men to doubt the Army of Northern Virginia’s supremacy on home ground.” In a recent study of Confederate numbers in the last year of the war, Steven Newton concludes that not only did the ANV recover by May 1864, “it was potentially stronger than it had been a year earlier.” And Gary Gallagher has recently cited, among other factors, the bond between Lee and his men, the army’s willingness to sacrifice belief in a demoralized enemy, and a belief that the arrival of Grant in the East did not constitute serious concern, as evidence of a “strong sense of optimism” in the ANV.

In his ongoing study of the “Overland Campaign,” Gordon Rhea gives Lee high marks for his ability to continually bring “the Union force to a standstill.” And “even though the Army of Northern Virginia was falling back,” writes Rhea, “its morale remained high.” According to Ernest Furgurson, tactically and strategically, “Lee won the campaign of 1864.” Lee’s success, according to Furgurson, can be attributed to the fact that he “frustrated” Grant’s goals of destroying Lee’s army and capturing Richmond. “By casualty count he [Lee] defeated Grant and Meade at the Wilderness. Then he fought them to better than a draw at Spotsylvania and checked them brilliantly on the North Anna.” Furgurson also argues that along the North Anna, morale remained high in the ANV.

In rejecting the common assumption that Grant’s move south of the James and the beginning of the siege of Petersburg marked a crucial turning point in Lee’s own mind, J. Tracy Power argues that although extensive field fortifications limited Lee’s preference for the offensive, they were also “a formidable obstacle to an enemy hoping to destroy his army.” Even in the trenches around Petersburg, writes Power, “it was clear to most of Lee’s soldiers that the end was nowhere in sight.” And even in early February 1865, after the fighting along Hatcher’s Run, many in the ANV “could claim success” in being able to prevent Grant from gaining a permanent foothold on the vital Boydton Plank Road. Echoing Freeman’s own point that many in the ANV remained hopeful in late 1864 early 1865, Power writes that “all was not despair, defeat, disaffection, and desertion in the camps of Lee’s army, for there were still stalwart Confederates, more optimistic than most, who believed that the cause was not yet still lost if the Southern people would only support the armies in the field.”

Freeman’s emphasis on Lee’s hopes of success once free from the constraints imposed on him by the Petersburg trenches continues to find a voice in recent histories. “Freed of the yoke of Richmond, of maintaining his men in miles of dismal trenches, writes Jay Winik, “he [Lee] was determined to rescue the South’s battered and bloodied sons.” This could be done, according to Winik, by taking advantage of the lengthening of Grant’s supply lines as he moved further west in pursuit and Lee’s knowledge of the Virginia countryside. Even after a ten-month siege, many of Lee’s men “press on,” despite the fact that they have no idea of the campaign’s outcome. “Even the forced abandonment of the Petersburg lines,” contends Wiley Sword, “wouldn’t necessarily be fatal, provided the army could be maintained in an ‘efficient condition.’” Finally, William Marvel concludes that until April 6, “the army had maintained a measure of its old esprit.”

Why historians have failed to acknowledge Freeman’s break with earlier Lost Cause histories is difficult to understand. This difficulty can perhaps be traced to the fact that it is so easy to read R.E. Lee as a product of Lost Cause assumptions. Freeman’s own personal ties to the Civil War generation, including his own father, who surrendered with Lee at Appomattox, are reasons to connect him with that earlier generation. Freeman’s early years were spent in Lynchburg, Virginia where he listened to stories by veterans, including Jubal Early. On moving to Richmond in 1891, Freeman was exposed regularly to reunions, parades, and other events involving Civil War veterans. Freeman himself referred to one reunion, which took place on the battlefield at Petersburg in 1903 when he was seventeen. “If someone doesn’t write the story of these men,” Freeman wrote after being moved by their presence, “it will be lost forever, and I’m going to do it.” Not surprisingly, this personal connection to the veterans, shaped Freeman’s understanding of the war in Virginia and the men who fought it; it also forged a connection with earlier Lost Cause histories, which emphasized the fighting prowess of both the army and its leaders.

Understanding how Freeman was able to make specific breaks with earlier Lost Cause histories is also difficult to pin down. Perhaps, most importantly is the fact that Freeman’s most important contributions to Civil War history, including R.E. Lee and Lee’s Lieutenants were written roughly seventy years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Histories such as those written by Jubal Early and other Lost Cause advocates should be seen as an extension of the war; their focus was not just on telling what they believed was a true story, but on vindicating their own involvement in the war and the cause for which they fought. This makes their interpretations “heroic” and highly moral in character. For Freeman, writing throughout the first half of the twentieth century, it is safe to say that the outcome of the event, as understood in earlier histories of the war “was no longer in question as it was for the first generation” of Lost Cause writers. Though he maintained a personal commitment to share the stories of the veterans he observed in Petersburg as a young man, Freeman could begin to see beyond a story that needed simply to be morally justified.

Historians’ attitudes regarding Freeman’s place in Civil War history fall on opposite ends of a spectrum. On one side, revisionist historians emphasize Freeman’s interpretive flaws, while on the other side, historians such as Robert Krick acknowledge Freeman as the “starting point for [any] study of R.E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia.” This polarization reflects the need for more detailed studies of the interpretive assumptions employed by Freeman in understanding the life and eventual defeat of Lee and the ANV. Such studies may give us a more accurate picture of why much of Freeman’s overall interpretation continues to resonate in Civil War studies.